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

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

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

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. 

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

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

Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, now that, and changes names as it changes in direction.

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

I won’t be happy till I’m as famous as God.

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.

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

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