Austin Kleon

“Sally Rooney on the hell of fame: ‘It doesn’t seem to work in any real way for anyone”
—Guardian headline

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Text from an author friend: “I’ve literally never heard of this person.”

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“People who intentionally become famous — I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it — are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease. There is something wrong with them, and when we look at them and learn from them, something goes wrong with us.”
—a novelist in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You?

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Text to my wife with the Rooney excerpt: “Show me the lie.”

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“It’s easy to trust that fame is a deeply mixed blessing, but everything that rock stars (literary and otherwise) seem to have discovered about that fact is simple and repetitive.”
—John Williams, review of Beautiful World, Where Are You?

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“Once an artist is swept up in the exigencies of fame, it becomes hard for them to object without sounding like a diva, or to complain without sounding like an ingrate.”
—Molly Fischer

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“I’m just so sick of myself. I can’t imagine how everyone else feels.”
—Ryan Gosling

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“Fame is experienced as an impact, like a car crash.”
—a psychologist in Hollywood Reporter

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“There’s nothing about fame that I’ve ever seen that’s healthy. It is something that is very hard to survive and has no intrinsic value unto itself.”
—Shep Gordon, Supermensch

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“Fame in a world like this is worthless.”
—Marcus Aurelius, 121–180 A.D.

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“I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!”
— Emily Dickinson

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Eddie Murphy, recalling the worst heckle he ever heard: “You ain’t nobody!”

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The writer Roddy Doyle tells a story about being famous in Ireland:

“I was waiting at Tara Street Dart station for a friend, and there was a bunch of lads coming down the quays, all in their late teens, lads in tracksuits, and one of them broke away and came right up to my face and said, ‘Are you Roddy Doyle?’”

“And I said, ‘I am, yeah.’”

“He said, ‘So what?’”

* * *

Tommy Tiernan: To be well known in Ireland, to me, is a blessing… It’s local.

Liam Cunningham: There’s a healthy begrudgery here, isn’t it?

* * *

In all the stories about Sally Rooney’s attitudes towards fame, I’ve heard very few people wonder whether her being Irish has anything to do with it.

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I think about another Irish woman, Sinead O’Connor, who says, of her fame, “I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career.”

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“In many ways, fame is the industrial disease of creativity – it’s a sludgy byproduct of making things.”
—Mike Myers

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“Fame is hollow. It amplifies what is there. If there is any self-doubt, or hatred, or lack of ability to connect with people, fame will magnify it.”
—Alanis Morissette

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Fame promises freedom from worry about the opinion of others only to trap the aspirer inside an even larger audience.”
—Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown

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Well, you’re in your little room
and you’re working on something good
but if it’s really good
you’re gonna need a bigger room
and when you’re in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sitting in your little room!”
—The White Stripes

* * *

“You have to learn to be unafraid when you’re a nobody, because you’re going to be really fucking afraid when you’re a somebody and all the lights are on you.”
—Lady Gaga

* * *

“One can’t work
by lime light.”
—Kay Ryan

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“Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the ‘successful’ writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip — all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dining room table, with a child’s beautifully clear eyes.”
—John Updike

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“The only thing that comes from fame is mediocrity.”
—Sleater-Kinney, “Hey Darling”

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Fame is wasted on everybody… except Kanye.”
—Noel Gallagher, 2015

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“Celebrity is the great American canvas, and Kanye makes a great mess of that canvas.”
—The Ringer, 2021

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“Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained?”
—Russell Crowe in the movie Gladiator, sampled by Jay-Z in “What More Can I Say?”

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“We all have a contract with the public—in us they see themselves or what they would like to be…. They love to put us on a pedestal and worship us…. But they’ve read the small print, and most of us haven’t…. So, when we get knocked off by gangsters… or get hooked on booze or dope or… just get sold… the public feels satisfied. Yeah, it’s a good idea to read that small print.”
—Clark Gable, quoted in Leo Braudy’s The Frenzy of Renown

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“One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were.”
—John Lennon

* * *

“I’ve had one motto which I’ve always lived by,” Gene Kelly tells us in Singin’ in the Rain, “Dignity. Always Dignity!” (We’re then treated to a montage of Kelly’s character surviving the various humiliations of filmmaking.)

* * *

In Here is New York, E.B. White wrote that one reason people from small towns escape to the big city is to avoid “the indignity of being observed.”

* * *

This very same “indignity of being observed” is what so many seek.