Quotes about fame

The singers make much of kings who die valiantly in battle, but your life is worth more than a song.

We afford automatic respect to superstar business moguls, politicians, and actors and to anyone flying around in a private jet, as if their accomplishments must reflect unique qualities not shared by those forced to eat commercial airline food. And we place too much confidence in the overly precise predictions of people - political pundits, financial experts, business consultants - who claim a track record demonstrating expertise.

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

I was on top of the mountain. But there was nothing there. Just clouds. And I found that you can't live on that mountain. But when it throws you off — oh, how you long for it! I would kill to climb it again. I would sell my soul. It is so stupid. [...] I took the standard. And now I can't even become a farmer again. The mountain won't let me.

Most of the heroes we remember—we remember only because they won. To win you must be ruthless. Single-minded ... which was why he had no friends—just admirers.

I never worshipped anything but my sword and my wits; now I suffer for it. But I can take it, for am I not a man? ... It is not hard to be a legend, Tenaka. It is what follows when you have to live like one.

It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.

Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo dies; but by and by, you only regret that you didn't see him do it.

You should never fall in love with your own press clippings, because it is very much the nature of the beast that the same journalists who build you up between Monday and Friday tear you down for weekend fun...My family's habit of living in the past seems to me pathological, even dangerous. If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future?

Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future people won't be famous for fifteen minutes. No, in the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at least fifteen minutes.

"It would be a crime to exhibit the fine side of war, even if there were one!" murmured one of the somber soldiers.

The first man continued. "They'll say those things to us by way of paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven't done. But military glory — it isn't even true for us common soldiers. It's for some, but outside those elect the soldier's glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier's sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap up their names, their poor little names of nobodies."

The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody.