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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.

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

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. 

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

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