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

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

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

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

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

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.

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

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

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

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 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. 

Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.

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