If fame is only to come after death, I am in no hurry for it.

They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.

Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction which inclines every man first to hope and then to believe that nature has given him something peculiar to himself. 

Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, now that, and changes names as it changes in direction.

When I do a show, the whole show revolves around me, and if I don’t show up, they can just forget it.

Now there is fame! Of all—hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public—fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation by God of the artist. It is sad. It is true.

Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.

How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”

I am sick and tired of publicity. I want no more of it. It puts me in a bad light. I just want to be forgotten.

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.