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

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury—to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.

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.

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.

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

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. 

I won’t be happy till I’m as famous as God.

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.

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

A woman’s greatest glory is to be little talked about by men, whether for good or ill.

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

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