“I may not be the most famous songwriter in the world, but you know a David Friedman song when you hear it. It took me a long time to appreciate that.”

“I love being famous. It validates that I have something to say.”

“I'd rather be able to face myself in the bathroom mirror than be rich and famous.”

“Why am I so famous? What am I doing right? What are the others doing wrong?”

“I hope this doesn't sound pompous but I don't think of myself as famous, whatever fame I've got has come through what I've done and associations of things I've done.”

“OK, so I'm not famous for the right reasons.”

“I was obsessed with being rich and famous.”

“No matter how famous and established they were or however blessed they were with great songs or long careers, if they lived alone, they lived alone. That's not the way I wanted to live prior to the tour or after.”

“I can never really enjoy being famous.”

“I don't really consider myself to be famous.”

“It wasn't being an alcoholic - it was going wild. It happened when I got famous. It was like having my teens in my early thirties: blotting out your life, not having to think about anything.”

“Although I get so much fan mail from Great Britain, tell me, am I more famous there than Michael Madsen?”

“There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.”

“Tom Cruise, he's a lot more famous than me.”

“In a lot of aspects it's cooler that we don't have a lot of really overly famous people in the band.”

“I always regarded people who want fame with a lot of suspicion. Unless you have a product to sell, I don't know why anyone would want to be famous. I can't imagine what need that would fill.”

“Thus, after finishing high school, I started with high expectations and enthusiasm to study chemistry at the famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.”

“I heard so many stories from Gaomi's peasants that I had an irrepressible urge to write them down. Today, Gaomi's peasants know that they have become famous around the world through my writings, but I think they are a little puzzled by this.”

“Luckily, I think, I never really wanted to be famous, I just wanted to make movies.”

“People just assume that if you're famous, you're in Hollywood.”

“Celebrity, to me, is not a thing to seek.”