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Life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion.
-Marcus Aurelius
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In the march up the heights of fame there comes a spot close to the summit in which man reads nothing but detective stories.
-Heywood Hale Broun
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Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town.
-Truman Capote
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It's all fleeting. As fame is fleeting, so are all the trappings of fame fleeting. The money, the clothes, the furniture.
-Johnny Cash
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Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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"Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" She asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office, and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; These two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."
-Roger Ebert
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In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.
-Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 1975
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The thirst for an enduring fame is near akin to the love of true excellence; but the fame of the moment is a dangerous possession and a bastard motive; and he who does his acts in order that the echo of them may come back as a soft music in his ears, plays false to his noble destiny as a Christian man, places himself in continual danger of dallying with wrong, and taints even his virtuous actions at their source.
-William Ewart Gladstone, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone by John Morley
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I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
-Aldous Huxley, Miss Thriplow, in Those Barren Leaves, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1925)
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Fortune is no real thing.
But men who cannot bear what comes to them
In Nature's way, give their own characters
The name of Fortune.
-Menander
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A place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul.
-Marilyn Monroe, (describing Hollywood)
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Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word “sophisticate” means, very simply, “obscene.” A sophisticated story is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a “sophisticate” means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.
-Dorothy Parker, From a speech given in 1939 to the left-wing Congress of American Voters: “Sophisticated Verse and the Hell With It.”
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Renown? I've already got more of it than those I respect, and will never have as much as those for whom I feel contempt...
-Jean Rostand
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I think I understand what military fame is; to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers.
-Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
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Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.
-Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza
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My biggest nightmare is I'm driving home and get sick and go to hospital. I say: 'Please help me.' And the people say: 'Hey, you look like...' And I'm dying while they're wondering whether I'm Barbra Streisand.
-Barbra Streisand
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Don’t call me an icon, honey. An icon is something you hang in a Russian church. Call me Dame Elizabeth or call me an aging movie star.
-Elizabeth Taylor
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Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
-John Updike
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I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.
-Andy Warhol
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Vain ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
-John Webster, Vanitas Vanitatum
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Books about Fame
