To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one’s landlady.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

There was my name up in lights. I said, ‚God, somebody’s made a mistake.‘ But there it was, in lights. And I sat there and said, ‚Remember, you’re not a star.‘ Yet there it was up in lights.

I hope when I’m dead I’ll be considered an icon, though.

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

These critics with the illusions they’ve created about artists – it’s like idol worship. They only like people when they’re on their way up… I cannot be on the way up again.

People want to act like they know celebrities. They want to see pictures. They want to know where you’re going. They want to hear you talk about your family.

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It’s fine to be a pop star. ‚Oh, it’s great, lots of fun, aren’t they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!‘

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

See, ‚A Time to Kill‘ was the one I got famous off of. Big ka-boom, over one weekend. After that, I did films that I really wanted to do.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere ‚stick‘ in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

I was an overnight sensation.

I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

I would never say I was an icon, but so many people have said I am, so I suppose I am. I mean, I can’t not be what everyone says I am. But I don’t feel like an icon.

If a star or studio chief or any other great movie personages find themselves sitting among a lot of nobodies, they get frightened – as if somebody was trying to demote them.

You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans.

The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals; but most people stuff themselves like cattle.

Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.

We were the first generation to have to deal with the modern stardom of football. Some handled it better than others.

You can’t reverse fame. You can lose all the money, but you’ll never lose people knowing you.

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

‚Fame‘ exhausts me.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it’ll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.

Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you’ve got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem. Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.

You look like a talent scout for a cemetery.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.

If I ever had twins, I’d use one for parts.

I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.

I’m an instant star. Just add water and stir.

Only the public can make a star. It’s the studios who try to make a system out of it.

Years ago, when I first started being a big star, I had fans that were fanatical. It was when ‚Jolene‘ was a big hit.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Fame may go by and – so long, I’ve had you.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Before I was famous, when I was just working in Gilbert’s Lodge, everything was moving in slow motion.

I don’t call up the press and say, ‚Look at me!‘

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.

If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me. I’d have killed myself.

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there is no offense.

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need.

I don’t think I could think of a single thing that’s more isolating than being famous.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.

If you modestly enjoy your fame you are not unworthy to rank with the holy.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.