"A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognised." - Fred Allen

"A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognised." - Fred Allen, Treadmill to Oblivion

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. . . . I want to achieve it through not dying." - Woody Allen, quoted in Woody Allen and his Comedy by Eric Lax

"Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid." - Francis Bacon, Essays

"The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness." - Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image

"Fame - a few words upon a tombstone, and the truth of those not to be depended on." - Christian Nestell Bovee

"The world, indeed, is like a dream and the treasures of the world are an alluring mirage! Like the apparent distances in a picture, things have no reality in themselves, but they are like heat haze." - Buddha

"In the very books in which philosophers bid us scorn fame, they inscribe their names." - Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta

"If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city." - Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon

"How dreary - to be - somebody! How public - like a frog - to tell your name - the livelong June - to an admiring bog!" - Emily Dickinson

"Nothing arouses ambition so much in the heart as the trumpet-clang of another's fame." - Baltasar Gracian

"Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity." - William Hazlitt

"A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know." - Henry Louis Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

"Fame is not just. She never finely or discriminatingly praises, but coarsely hurrahs." - Henry David Thoreau

"In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." - Andy Warhol, widely attributed to and acknowledged by Warhol

"Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity." - RUSSELL BAKER, in New York Times

"Fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice cold and lonely as the north pole." - VICKI BAUM, Grand Hotel

"Fame is a bee.
It has a song
It has a sting
Ah, too, it has a wing."
- EMILY DICKINSON, Fame is a bee

"If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." - RALPH WALDO EMERSON, attributed, quoted by Sarah Yule and Mary S. Keene in Borrowings (1889)

"Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else." - OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table

"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
That last infirmity of noble mind
To scorn delights, and live laborious days."
- JOHN MILTON, Lycidas

"Love of fame is the last thing even the wise give up." - TACITUS, Histories

"If you want a place in the sun, you have to expect a few blisters." - LORETTA YOUNG, quoted in John Robert Colombo's Popcorn in Paradise

"The great are only great because we are on our knees." - Connolly, James