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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

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. 

Reality is always the foe of famous names.