Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Usually, TED only invites the most accomplished and famous people in the world to give talks.
I'm not one of those famous people flying round the world emoting over every catastrophe. I'm too feeble.
I don't want to be famous. I like to be able to sit in a cafe and watch the world go by and observe people.
To be a star is to own the world and all the people in it. After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty.
I grew up in celebrity world, so I know what famous people are like, and I've never looked up to them in that way.
I don't want to be famous. I want to be secure. I don't want the world. I just want a piece of it. I want people to remember Eric Davis.
Disinterring famous people has become a kind of sport in the Hispanic world. Before Cervantes, it happened to Evita, Che Guevara, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Pablo Neruda.
One of the problems with being famous is people mob you wherever you go. Many of them ask very irritating questions. If I were not the shortest woman in the world, I would not have become famous.
Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.
The world is a bell curve. Classroom test scores, employee performance in a company or how many people really, really like you. No matter the population you're studying, they always fit neatly across the standard deviations of the famous bell curve.
As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.