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

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

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

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

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.

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.