Art & Creativity Quote by Jerry B. Jenkins

Fame is a costume that looks best from the cheap seats, and Jerry B. Jenkins writes like someone who has spent time backstage. By invoking a lineup as varied as Walter Payton, Hank Aaron, and Billy Graham, he’s not just name-dropping; he’s establishing a cross-cultural sample size. Athlete, slugger, evangelist: different worlds, same gravitational pull of public attention. The point isn’t that celebrity is “bad,” but that it’s asymmetrical. Outsiders see access, glamour, permission to matter. Insiders live the invoice: surveillance, projection, and the constant tax of being interpreted by strangers.

Jenkins’ intent is quietly corrective. As a novelist who has collaborated with high-profile figures, he positions himself as a professional intimate - close enough to witness the human costs, distant enough to report them without performing them. There’s a pragmatic, almost craftsmanlike cynicism here: fame “looks good” because it’s mostly a visual economy, consumed at a distance. Up close, it’s logistics. It’s the loss of ordinary anonymity, the pressure to be legible, the weird loneliness of being widely known and narrowly understood.

The subtext lands hardest in the phrase “only to people who don’t have it.” That “only” is a door slamming on the fantasy. Jenkins isn’t romanticizing obscurity; he’s puncturing the idea that recognition is a stable form of happiness. Fame, he suggests, is less a reward than a condition - one that can’t be fully explained to those still wishing for it.