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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

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

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. 

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!

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