All people have the common desire to be elevated in honor, but all people have something still more elevated in themselves without knowing 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.

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

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

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

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

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. 

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

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.

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

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.

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