Creativity Quote by Carly Simon

Carly Simon’s line lands like a sly diary entry from the era when “wellness” stopped being a private habit and became a public performance. She’s not just talking about exercise; she’s calling out a cultural mood in which virtue is measured in visible restraint. “In shape physically” functions as a socially approved goal, while “deny ourselves any pleasure” exposes the bargain underneath: health framed less as self-care than self-punishment.

The quote’s power is its casual “we.” Simon folds herself into the indictment, which makes it feel less like scolding and more like recognition: yes, we’re all complicit, and yes, it’s exhausting. That collective pronoun also points to peer pressure as the engine of the trend. Nobody wants to be the one who orders dessert, skips the workout, or admits that discipline has started to look like deprivation.

Contextually, it resonates with the late-20th-century pivot from indulgence to optimization: diet culture, aerobics-as-identity, the rise of “clean living” as status. Coming from Simon, whose work has always been attuned to desire, image, and the stories we tell about ourselves, the critique carries an artist’s suspicion of scripts. She’s noticing how pleasure gets recoded as moral failure, and how bodies become projects rather than lived-in homes.

There’s a melancholy in “this period now,” too: a sense that the pendulum has swung so far toward control that joy starts to feel illicit. Simon isn’t arguing against health. She’s asking what it costs when pleasure becomes something you have to earn.