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.

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. 

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

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