“For me to get into that creative process I have to have a sort of quiet place that I work from. And if I was living the life of … somebody in the industry, as a pop star or whatever, it's too distracting. It's too to do with other people's perceptions of who you are, and what's important to me is to be a human being who has a soul, and who hopefully has a sense of who they are, not who everybody else thinks you are.
And I think, you know, that's something that's very difficult for people who become extremely famous. I mean, I find it completely ridiculous this obsession with celebrities. … Why are celebrities so important to people? It's absolute crap. I mean, the important people are surgeons and doctors and people actually put people back together and make a difference to people's lives. Not somebody who's in an ad on telly. I mean, okay, so that's valid for what it is, too. But why so much attention on something that's so shallow?”

From an interview in “How Critically Acclaimed Violinist Edward W. Hardy Is Transforming Mood Into Music” https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreazarczynski/2021/02/23/how-critically-acclaimed-violinist-edward-w-hardy-is-transforming-mood-into-music/?sh=1b2d2ca64962 Forbes (2021 Feb 23)

discussing the support and encouragement she received at the start of her film career
Filmmaker Magazine - Article & Interview by Vadim Rizov - “Women Directors are One More Problem We Don’t Need”: Joan Micklin Silver on Chilly Scenes of Winter https://filmmakermagazine.com/88270-women-directors-are-one-more-problem-we-dont-need-joan-micklin-silver-on-chilly-scenes-of-winter/#.X_JSlC9h3Up - 11 November 2014 - Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210911141834/https://filmmakermagazine.com/88270-women-directors-are-one-more-problem-we-dont-need-joan-micklin-silver-on-chilly-scenes-of-winter/

Interview with actress Nastassja Kinski, Indiantelevision.com, 23 August, 2003

Fern Britton Meets John Barrowman BBC (2012)

Preface (December 1960) to The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (1961), p. xvi; the last line was originally used in the initial edition of her autobiography: This Is My Story (1937)

Source: Magic Shifts

Play to Live : Lectures of Alan Watts (1982)
Context: Archimedes said, "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth"; but there isn't one. It is like betting on the future of the human race — I might wish to lay a bet that the human race would destroy itself by the year 2000, but there is nowhere to place the bet. On the contrary, I am involved in the world and must try to see that it does not blow itself to pieces. I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb, and how everybody should spring into action and abolish it, but she was getting so furious about it that I said to her: "You scare me because I think you are the kind of person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first." So she told me that I had no love for my future generations, that I had no responsibility for my children, and that I was a phony swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintained my position. As Robert Oppenheimer said a short while before he died, "It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so." You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe that is the way it has got to be. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise.