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

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!

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

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

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.

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

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. 

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

All people have the common desire to be elevated in honor, but all people have something still more elevated in themselves without knowing it.

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

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

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

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.