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

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

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

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.

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. 

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 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.

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

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.

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

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