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

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

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

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.

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. 

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.

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

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.

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

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