Reality is always the foe of famous names.

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

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.

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

We all have a contract with the public—in us they see themselves, or what they would like to be.

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

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

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

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

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!

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. 

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

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