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Creativity Quote by Bobby Darin

"There are certain times I don't want my picture taken. If my wife's stepping out of a car and it looks like it's going to come out an indecent picture, don't I have a right to object?"

About this Quote

A pop star’s charm curdles into boundary-setting the moment the camera stops being a souvenir and becomes a weapon. Bobby Darin frames his complaint in the mild language of “certain times” and “don’t I have a right,” but the question isn’t really a question. It’s a challenge to an industry that treated celebrity as public property, and wives as collateral.

The phrase “stepping out of a car” is doing heavy cultural work: it evokes the paparazzi ambush as a ritual of the era, a curbside trap where a flashbulb could turn an ordinary movement into a sexualized headline. Darin’s “indecent picture” doesn’t necessarily mean nudity; it points to the mechanics of humiliation - the bad angle, the caught hem, the split-second that can be sold as scandal. He’s naming a pre-digital version of what we’d now call consent and context collapse: a private person’s body turned into public narrative without her participation.

There’s also a gendered subtext he doesn’t quite interrogate. He advocates for his wife’s dignity, but he does it through ownership-adjacent language: “my wife,” “my picture,” “my right to object.” The protective impulse is sincere, yet it reveals the period’s default assumption that a husband serves as the gatekeeper of a woman’s public image.

Darin’s intent lands as both personal and political: a request for decency, and an early protest against the paparazzi economy that thrives on making “indecent” out of the merely inconvenient.

Quote Details

TopicHusband & Wife
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Darin, Bobby. (2026, January 17). There are certain times I don't want my picture taken. If my wife's stepping out of a car and it looks like it's going to come out an indecent picture, don't I have a right to object? FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-certain-times-i-dont-want-my-picture-49572/

Chicago Style
Darin, Bobby. "There are certain times I don't want my picture taken. If my wife's stepping out of a car and it looks like it's going to come out an indecent picture, don't I have a right to object?" FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-certain-times-i-dont-want-my-picture-49572/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There are certain times I don't want my picture taken. If my wife's stepping out of a car and it looks like it's going to come out an indecent picture, don't I have a right to object?" FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-certain-times-i-dont-want-my-picture-49572/. Accessed 5 Apr. 2026.

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Bobby Darin on Privacy and Objecting to Paparazzi
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About the Author

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Bobby Darin (May 14, 1936 - December 20, 1973) was a Musician from USA.

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