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

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

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

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

Now there is fame! Of all—hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public—fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation by God of the artist. It is sad. It is true.

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

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it, and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

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!

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.

A woman’s greatest glory is to be little talked about by men, whether for good or ill.