44 Publicity Quotes

In my life, I don't need to have my face plastered everywhere. It's not really something I want.

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation.

How dreary - to be - Somebody! How public - like a Frog - To tell one's name - the livelong June - To an admiring Bog!

A famous writer who wants to continue writing has to be constantly defending himself against fame. I don't really like to say this because it never sounds sincere, but I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death, so I wouldn't have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer. In my case, the only advantage to fame is that I have been able to give it a political use. Otherwise, it is quite uncomfortable. The problem is that you're famous for twenty-four hours a day, and you can't say, 'Okay, I won't be famous until tomorrow,' or press a button and say, 'I won't be famous here or now.'

An essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

The day has clearly gone forever of societies small enough for their members to have personal acquaintance with one another, and to find their station through the appraisal of those who have first hand knowledge of them. Publicity is an evil substitute and the art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, every year adds to its potency and to the finality of its judgments. The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country whether we like it or not, we must learn to accept it.

'As soon as you start talking about mystique, you have none.' -- Interview for Rolling Stone magazine.

Letterman, after the singer brands him a 'sick fuck': 'You realize this is being broadcast don't you?'

Madonna: 'Listen, all you do is talk about my sex life on your show, so now you don't want to talk about my sex life when I'm on your show?!'

What they had me doing first was autographing copies of Come and Get It at the Bon Marche, where I had been fired a couple of years back. That was bad enough but think of me autographing a book written by somebody else. That took crust but it didn't turn out so badly because when I got to the store, about twenty people finally strolled in and looked at me from a distance and kept their buying firmly in control. What the Goldwyn people had forgotten was that up that way I'm still remembered as the freak from West Seattle High.

I think that more than writing and music, my greatest talent is that I have an instinctive knack of self-image propagation. I was very good at manipulating publicity with a few little phrases like 'erotic politicians'. Having grown up with TV and mass magazines, I knew instinctively what people would catch on to, so I dropped those little jewels here and there, seemingly very innocently; of course, I was just calling signals.

We never made love in a bag. People probably imagined that we were making love. It was just, all of us are in a bag, you know. The point was the outline of the bag, you know, the movement of the bag, how much we see of a person, you know. But, inside, there might be a lot going on. Or maybe nothing's going on.

I know this may give her a mystique and make the press all the more curious about her, but that's not the intention; it's not a ploy to get her more attention. She genuinely doesn't see why people should be interested in her personal life and she certainly doesn't like going out to clubs or trendy restaurants. It's just not her.

Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship.

From time to time throughout his long life, scientists and commentators dismissed him as a showman. Would that we had a whole troupe of such scientific showmen.

I don't think that Mr [Jarvis] Cocker truly understood what I was doing. It wasn't like I was saying 'I am Jesus', I was just drawing some parallels between Christ and me, like maybe I was sent here to spread the good news through dancing. I wouldn't say I have a messiah complex. ~From a statement released after Cocker nearly interrupted his performance of Earth Song during the 1996 Britt Awards.

Did you see Melina and I at the See No Evil Premiere?!

I think they just thought she would be a good kind of lightning rod. We did one or two rehearsals, and I know for a fact that people liked her legs.

A lot of things have happened in my private life recently that I thought we could review tonight.

Apparently everyone thinks there's a bunch of people in an uproar over J.C. Chasez' new album title, 'Schizophrenic.' In actuality it's just four people with hundreds of personalities.

I must confess that I feel grateful for the banning, or the temporary withdrawal, of de Mello's books. I had heard of him, but never read his writings. Excommunication, somehow, has far more news value than beatification. So also the suppression of a book attracts greater publicity than its publication. ~ T.K. Thomas

They wanted to know how I succeeded in getting so much publicity, I said by having a small audience, I said if you have a big audience you have no publicity, this did seem to worry them and naturally it would worry them they wanted the publicity and the big audience, and really to have the biggest publicity you have to have a small one, yes all right the biggest publicity comes from the realest poetry and the realest poetry has a small audience not a big one, but it is really exciting and therefore it has the biggest publicity, all right that is it. ~ Ch. 4

The fact that Fred and I were in no way similar - nor were we the best male dancers around never occurred to the public or the journalists who wrote about us...Fred and I got the cream of the publicity and naturally we were compared. And while I personally was proud of the comparison, because there was no-one to touch Fred when it came to 'popular' dance, we felt that people, especially film critics at the time, should have made an attempt to differentiate between our two styles. Fred and I both got a bit edgy after our names were mentioned in the same breath. I was the Marlon Brando of dancers, and he the Cary Grant. My approach was completely different from his, and we wanted the world to realise this, and not lump us together like peas in a pod. If there was any resentment on our behalf, it certainly wasn't with each other, but with people who talked about two highly individual dancers as if they were one person. For a start, the sort of wardrobe I wore - blue jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers - Fred wouldn't have been caught dead in. Fred always looked immaculate in rehearsals, I was always in an old shirt. Fred's steps were small, neat, graceful and intimate - mine were ballet-oriented and very athletic. The two of us couldn't have been more different, yet the public insisted on thinking of us as rivals...I persuaded him to put on his dancing shoes again, and replace me in Easter Parade after I'd broken my ankle. If we'd been rivals, I certainly wouldn't have encouraged him to make a comeback

Without publicity there can be no public support, and without public support every nation must decay.

I wish I wasn't ... There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it.

I felt eyes upon me, and they pulled me away. I looked at the gathering of eager cops; some were merely curious, while others, I knew, sought their own secret satisfaction. They all wanted to see it, my face, a defense attorney's face, here in this musty place where murder was more than a case file, where the victim was flesh and blood, the smell that of family gone to dust. I felt their eyes. I knew what they wanted, and so I turned to look again upon the almost empty clothes, the flash of bone so pale and curving. But I would give them nothing, and my body did not betray me, for which I was grateful. For what I felt was the return of a long-quiescent rage, and the certain conviction that this was the most human my father had ever appeared to me.

It was a bad day. It was just feeling on display, feeling like a novelty, really. And it was being around people who only talked about the work and the money and you just think, Fuck you. Fuck you. And then you walk into this hotel you've never been at, that someone's booked you in, and you go, Blaaaagghh - I can't stand it anymore, man. I hate it! I would have been much better off in a barn with a bottle of wine and some hay. There was a part of me that was just like, Fuck it. I don't want to be stared at, I don't want to be poked at, I don't want to be prodded. You just want to live simply and not be fucked with. So it just mounted and mounted and I socked a vase or something. It felt good, felt right. It just seemed like the right thing to do, smash a couple of things. And it was. (2003)

The owner approached my publicist about two years after the incident and thanked her. Said, 'It was so great for us that Johnny got arrested at our hotel and sent to jail. You can't imagine the business we got out of it.' (2003)

The thing that fascinates me is: who cares what an actor thinks? [on his reluctance to give interviews] (2004)

It took a lot of water to down just that fucking bat's head, let me tell you. It's still stuck in my fucking throat, after all these years. People all over the world say, 'You're the guy who kills creatures? You still do it? You do it every night?' It happened fucking once, for Christ's sake.

If I had done everything they said I've done, I'd be dead.

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

A pinch of notoriety will do.

I am not famous; I am notorious and if I am rich it is because I have taken my wages in people.

When Mr. John P. Gavit, managing editor of the New York Evening Post, wrote to Mr. Melville E. Stone, general manager of the Associated Press, that I had a reputation 'as an insatiable hunter of personal publicity,' what Mr. Gavit meant was that I was accustomed to demand and obtain more space in newspapers than the amount of my worldly possessions entitled me to.