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Creativity Quote by Cilla Black

"Nothing is a career move. Everything I've done this year has so not been a career move"

About this Quote

“Nothing is a career move” lands like a shrug that’s also a dare. Coming from Cilla Black, it reads as both self-protection and quiet provocation: the refusal to let a life in entertainment be reduced to strategy. The phrasing is almost aggressively plain, the kind of bluntness that cuts through an industry built on spin. She’s not claiming she’s above ambition; she’s rejecting the idea that every action must be justified as brand-building.

The subtext is a pushback against a particular kind of modern narrative: the constant retroactive framing of choices as calculated steps on a ladder. When Black says “Everything I’ve done this year has so not been a career move,” the emphasis isn’t just on spontaneity. It’s on fatigue with the expectation to perform intentionality, to explain yourself in the language of PR. There’s relief in it: a permission slip to do things because they’re interesting, necessary, or human, not because they optimize your “trajectory.”

Context matters because Black’s public identity was already larger than any single job title. She came up in a British pop culture ecosystem that could turn warmth into a commodity and missteps into spectacle. For someone who’d been a star, a TV presence, a tabloid figure, “career move” is also code for the game of staying palatable. Her line suggests she’s opting out, at least temporarily, of the anxious calculus of relevance.

It works because it’s anti-mythmaking. In a business that sells the illusion of control, she admits mess, impulse, and life. That honesty reads like confidence.

Quote Details

TopicCareer
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Black, Cilla. (2026, January 15). Nothing is a career move. Everything I've done this year has so not been a career move. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/nothing-is-a-career-move-everything-ive-done-this-161148/

Chicago Style
Black, Cilla. "Nothing is a career move. Everything I've done this year has so not been a career move." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/nothing-is-a-career-move-everything-ive-done-this-161148/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Nothing is a career move. Everything I've done this year has so not been a career move." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/nothing-is-a-career-move-everything-ive-done-this-161148/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Cilla Black (May 27, 1943 - August 1, 2015) was a Musician from United Kingdom.

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