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

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

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.

What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.

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

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

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

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

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!

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

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.

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.