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.

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

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

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.

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