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

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.

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!

Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.

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.

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury—to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.

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

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

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. 

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

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

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

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.