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.

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

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

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

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. 

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

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

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.

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

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