"If I didn't care for fun and such,
I'd probably amount to much.
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn."
— Dorothy Parker

"Why are they all staring?" demanded Albus as he and Rose craned around to look at the other students.

"Don’t let it worry you," said Ron. "It’s me. I’m extremely famous.""
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have."
— Andy Warhol (Andy Warhol)

"Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are."
— Erica Jong

"And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile — except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison.'"
— Isaac Asimov (Murder at the ABA)

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

"I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it."
— George Bernard Shaw

"Simple, genuine goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and is the only riches we can take out of this world with us."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Men)

"I'm an instant star, just add water."
— David Bowie

"What a waste of time to be posthumously famous."
— Orson Scott Card

"The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame."
— Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour)

"I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up"
— Frank O'Hara

"And when I'm with men in the studio, they don't like a woman telling them what to do, no matter how famous you are."
— Shakira

"Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
— Andy Warhol

"Think champagne, drink champagne!"
— Ellen Dean

"The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat."
— Fran Lebowitz

"I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know!
How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!"
— Emily Dickinson

"Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"I wanted to live! I’ve had so much fun— you know, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, we’re both in there, but you get to a certain age and then if you don’t stop, you’re gonna die. I chose life! I think my fans want to see more records from me. I had reached my quota."
— Ace Frehley

"A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup."
— J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places."
— Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife: A Novel)

"The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"One can't work/by limelight.//A bowlful/right at/one's elbow//produces no/more than/a baleful/glow against/the kitchen table.//The fruit purveyor's/whole unstable/pyramid//doesn't equal/what daylight did."
— Kay Ryan

"When a great man dies, little men always rush to get into the act--to boast, if they can, that they "once saw Shelley plain", that he did stop and speak to them and they to him."
— Mary Stahlman Douglas

"Fame Imperishable and glory that will never die -- that is what we march for!"
— Steven Pressfield (The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great)

"French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer than God and traveled in his very own Pullman car, and Emmie Hubbard of the Uncas Road, who painted the most beautiful pictures when she was drunk and burned them in her woodstove when she was sober, were all ten times more interesting to me than Milton's devil or Austen's boy-crazy girls or that twitchy fool of Poe's who couldn't think of any place better to bury a body than under his own... floor."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"The public loves to create a hero....Somtimes I think they do it for the sheer joy of knocking him down from the highest peak. Like a child who builds a house of blocks and then destroys it with one vicious kick."
— Grace Metalious (Return to Peyton Place)

"Selbst die Verwandten der Berühmten [sind] berühmt, denn Ruhm [ist] erblich."
— Hanif Kureishi (Der Buddha aus der Vorstadt)

"Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars creating this allure, this perception of perfection. And the last thing we want people to know is that we're actually just real people who deal with real problems."
— John James

"The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable."
— Fannie Flagg (Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!: A Novel)

"To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame"
— Alfred de Vigny (Stello)

"People just like to be on camera. There's a huge desire to be in front of the camera, and once there, people will say and do almost anything. It's sort of a drug, and I think people get addicted to it."
— Steve Carell