Most authors seek fame, but I seek for justice—a holier impulse than ever entered into the ambitious struggles of the votaries of that fickle, flirting goddess.

Fame is no sanctuary from the passing of youth. Suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

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 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. 

What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.

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

Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrities when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves.

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.

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.

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

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.