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

I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.

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

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it, and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

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.

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

What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.

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.

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. 

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.

Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!

And what will history say of me a thousand years hence?