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

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

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

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

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

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

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.

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

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

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

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

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