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

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

I am sick and tired of publicity. I want no more of it. It puts me in a bad light. I just want to be forgotten.

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

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.

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. 

He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.

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

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

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

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

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