"It's pleasant and bothersome and embarrassing all at once. Especially when you haven't done much and are a celebrity"
About this Quote
Celebrity is a weird kind of applause: it lands like confetti and feels like paperwork. Nastassja Kinski’s line nails that double exposure, where admiration and discomfort occupy the same frame. “Pleasant” acknowledges the basic human hit of being seen; “bothersome” and “embarrassing” admit the hangover. The mood swing isn’t indecision, it’s diagnosis. Fame isn’t a single emotion, it’s a cocktail of validation and surveillance.
The real barb is in the qualifier: “Especially when you haven’t done much.” Kinski isn’t performing false humility so much as poking at the scammy mechanics of celebrity culture, where visibility can detach from merit and become its own currency. That’s the subtext: fame can arrive early, or loudly, or for reasons that have nothing to do with craft, and the recipient is expected to act grateful anyway. The embarrassment isn’t just personal; it’s moral. Being treated like you’ve earned something you don’t feel you’ve earned creates a social debt you can’t repay.
As an actress who became iconic young, Kinski is also pointing to the specific unease of being made into an image. The “bothersome” part is the loss of proportion: strangers’ attention inflates you beyond your actual work, then demands you inhabit the inflated version. Her sentence works because it refuses the tidy narrative of fame as prize, and instead frames it as an ongoing mismatch between public myth and private ledger.
The real barb is in the qualifier: “Especially when you haven’t done much.” Kinski isn’t performing false humility so much as poking at the scammy mechanics of celebrity culture, where visibility can detach from merit and become its own currency. That’s the subtext: fame can arrive early, or loudly, or for reasons that have nothing to do with craft, and the recipient is expected to act grateful anyway. The embarrassment isn’t just personal; it’s moral. Being treated like you’ve earned something you don’t feel you’ve earned creates a social debt you can’t repay.
As an actress who became iconic young, Kinski is also pointing to the specific unease of being made into an image. The “bothersome” part is the loss of proportion: strangers’ attention inflates you beyond your actual work, then demands you inhabit the inflated version. Her sentence works because it refuses the tidy narrative of fame as prize, and instead frames it as an ongoing mismatch between public myth and private ledger.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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