Michael Tolkin Quotes

I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.

You get to be famous or have some notoriety and there are so many people who want a piece of you.

If you're a baby about the media, as I was, you can't imagine what it's like when the great approval machine shines its beam on you, when every time you cross the street someone comes out of a manhole to talk about your haircut.

Now that people know who I am, I get offered plays here and there. It was so much easier to do it when nobody knew who I was. I can't even imagine that somebody would come and pay money just to come and see me now.

I feel for anybody who has that level of celebrity where you can't lead a normal life.

Really, I think of fame as distracting; it's something you have to get around.

I think I have just always had an awareness that when you go to a premiere and people start cheering and shouting your name and stuff, they are shouting at a perception of you that they have.

I knew that people disliked me, and there always will be, but that's the price you pay for being in the limelight, so to speak.

I didn't necessarily want to be famous growing up, but I knew I would be a good famous person because I'm not offended if somebody comes up to me and knows things about me and wants to engage me in a conversation.

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

I've been famous my entire life; I don't know any other way.

I've made my peace with being in the spotlight, definitely.

I find fame to be quite unnatural. Humans are not built for extreme adoration.

There's so much craziness that comes along with being a movie star that you can get so confused. Unless you've spent your whole life waiting to be the centre of attention, it's pretty terrifying.

I never really enjoyed the fame stuff.

I'm not interested in the limelight.

Fame is a weird one. You need to distance yourself from it. People see a value in you that you don't see yourself.

There's a weird cloud around you when you're recognizable. It was a brief window for me. I think you have to have a pathological need for attention of any type, negative or positive, to thrive in that kind of situation. And I only want compliments.

I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.

I had my Aunt Rosie, who was famous and then not, so I got a lesson in fame early on. And I understood how little it has to do with you. And also how you could use it.

Fame is a magnifying glass

You can't really fault people who are experiencing fame. They're just making their way through, and everybody around them is reflecting this fame right back at them. It's strange.

I have very strong feelings about what modern fame means, and the toxicity of it.

I don't care about being in the public eye.

I don't want to be a rock star. I had my 15 minutes of fame.