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

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

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

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.

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

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.

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. 

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.

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

Men are generally more pleased with a widespread than with a great reputation.

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!

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

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.