FAME QUOTES
quotations about fame
Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrity when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves. They are at the beginning of a series of small worries, thunderbolts hidden under flowers, but they know how to hold in check that monster advertisement. It is a sort of octopus with innumerable tentacles. It throws out to right and left, in front and behind, its clammy arms, and gathers in, through its thousand little suckers, all the gossip and slander and praise afloat, to spit out again at the public when it is vomiting its black gall. But those who are caught in the clutches of celebrity at the age of twenty two know nothing.
SARAH BERNHARDT
My Double Life
Beneath the dream of fame, another dream, a dream of no longer dissolving and staying dissolved in the grey, faceless and insipid mass of commodities, a dream of turning into a notable, noticed and coveted commodity, a talked about commodity, a commodity standing out from the mass of commodities, a commodity impossible to overlook, to deride, to be dismissed. In a society of consumers, turning into a desirable commodity is the stuff of which dreams, and fairy tales, are made.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Consuming Life
I did nothing to attract attention. My somewhat fantastic tastes, my paleness and thinness, my peculiar way of dressing, my scorn of fashion, my general freedom in all respects, made me a being quite apart from all others. I did not recognise the fact. I did not read, I never read, the newspapers. So I did not know what was said about me, either favourable or unfavourable. Surrounded by a court of adorers of both sexes, I lived in a sunny dream.
SARAH BERNHARDT
My Double Life
Fame is a food that dead men eat.
HENRY AUSTIN DOBSON
Fame is a Food that Dead Men Eat
It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
LILLIAN HELLMAN
"Theatre", Pentimento
In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.
ANDY WARHOL
Andy Warhol's Exposures
Sometimes the pinnacle of fame and the height of folly are twin peaks.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
The majority of famous men are not taken unawares by fame. On the wall of their minds hangs their own vision of what they ought to be and can be. They are not surprised by success when it comes; because they have seen it coming, and planned out its coming, in their dreams.
BRUCE FAIRCHILD BARTON
More Power to You
It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
I've always been famous, it's just no one knew it yet.
LADY GAGA
attributed, The Performance Identities of Lady Gaga
If fame goes by, so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So at least it's something I experienced, but that's not where I live.
MARILYN MONROE
interview with Richard Meryman, Life Magazine, Aug. 3, 1962
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to be well-known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
FRED ALLEN
Treadmill to Oblivion
I always like to say to people who want to be rich and famous, try being rich first. See if that doesn't cover most of it.
BILL MURRAY
"I know how to be sour", The Guardian, December 2003
Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats.
VICTOR HUGO
Villemain
My fame had become annoying for my enemies, and a little trying, I confess, for my friends.
SARAH BERNHARDT
My Double Life
Fame is a bright flower, but weeds abound mostly around it.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Ficciones
What is Fortune, what is Fame?
Futile gold and phantom name--
Riches buried in a cave,
Glory written on a grave.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The Talisman"
The desire for fame tempts even noble minds.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God