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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

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

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

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!

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