"Persons famous in the arts partake of the immortality of princes, and are upon a footing with them"

"Immortality - a fate worse than death"

"Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die"

"Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability"

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying"

"How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?"

"The thing about being famous is, it's weird. The only people who get how weird it is are other famous people"

"Whereas you have someone like Houdini, who works really, really hard to get really, really famous, and then has actual intellectual ideas that he puts into the culture that stay there"

"The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort"

"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error"

"So I'm a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They're living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops"