Art & Creativity Quote by Dorothy Stratten

Stratten’s plea for “positive” talk lands like a bright postcard from inside a machine that runs on bruises. As a celebrity, she’s pointing at a grim media law: attention is easier to harvest when it’s laced with shame, scandal, and insinuation. “The way many write” isn’t just a complaint about rude people; it’s an indictment of an industry that treats a young woman’s public image as a consumable narrative, and “bad things” as the quickest route to credibility. Negativity signals seriousness. Positivity gets filed under fluff.

The intent is straightforward self-preservation: if you’re going to turn me into a story, at least don’t make me the villain in my own life. But the subtext is sharper. Stratten is implicitly negotiating the terms of her visibility. She’s acknowledging that she can’t stop people from talking; she can only ask for the tone to change. That’s the asymmetry of celebrity: the subject has feelings, the audience has appetite, the press has deadlines.

Her rhetorical strategy is disarming, almost childlike in its phrasing - “what’s the use?” and “it’s a lot more fun” - which doubles as a quiet rebuke. She frames kindness not as moral virtue but as basic competence and pleasure, exposing how perverse the system is when cruelty reads as “interesting.”

Coming from Stratten, whose life was cut short amid exploitation and control, the line carries extra gravity. It’s not naive optimism; it’s a desperate insistence that a person is more than the worst story you can sell about them.