Vanity Quotes - Page 37

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

Vanity's ridiculous, but we all fall prey to it from time to time.

What you do is take the power [popularity] gives you - which is very temporary and minor but significant - and use it. The danger is that you use it on a vanity project that no one wants to watch.

Nothing fans me into such a state of peaceful mental somnambulance as the intellectual antics of a person who displays his learning, not from vanity always, but frequently because it is all he has got; no real sense, no wisdom of his own, merely much good stuff he has learned from other sources. He spreads it like a garment as any other decent person would to hide the thinness of his shanks.

Not everything you hear about yourself can be considered good publicity. And if you have delicate sensibilities, the currycomb of public imagination frequently rubs your vanities the wrong way.

Vanity Fair magazine reports that former President Clinton and Al Gore haven't spoken to each other since George W. Bush's inauguration. Not only that, Bill and his wife, Hillary, haven't spoken since Richard Nixon's inauguration.

The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.

If I ever had any vanity, then I definitely lost it by being on television. It doesn't do you any favours in terms of showing you what you look like and what your emotions are.

If I ever had any vanity, then I definitely lost it by being on television.

Lois and Alexander are by far the most beautiful creatures in the class; their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort.

It's always our touches of vanity that manage to betray us.

I am simply not such a slave to my vanity, and I don't want to be, because as you get older you really have to start accepting the inevitable.

Those who obtain riches by labor, care, and watching, know their value. Those who impart them to sustain and extend knowledge, virtue, and religion, know their use. Those who lose them by accident or fraud know their vanity. And those who experience the difficulties and dangers of preserving them know their perplexities.

None of us are so much praised or censured as we think.

Those who bequeath unto themselves a pompous funeral, are at just so much expense to inform the world of something that had much better be concealed; namely, that their vanity has survived themselves.

Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?

A big success can be very confusing if it comes too early in your life. When you are young, you are more vulnerable to vanity. I was 36 when I wrote The Shadow of the Wind and the success of it was very gradual. If you have this kind of success straight off, I think there is a danger you can become an idiot, because you don't have a perspective. It hasn't changed me a lot. I fly first class now. But those things don't change you. If I am pretentious, I was before, I haven't changed. The only thing is, I am less anxious now.

From time to time, just about every Vanity Fair writer has a chance to sell rights to an article or a book to Hollywood.

I'm not invited to the Vanity Fair dinner where they watch the Oscars - or even the Oscars themselves - so I sit at home and watch it with a bunch of close friends.

God got the power, man has got his vanity. Man gotta choose before God can set him free.

We need not have the loftiest mind to understand that here is no lasting and real satisfaction, that our pleasures are only vanity, that our evils are infinite, and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.

Vanity is illustrated in the cause and effect of love, as in the case of Cleopatra.

That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.

Vanity is a motive of immense potency.

What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it's easy to have glory without power.