“Fame itself … doesn’t really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.”
– David Bowie

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
– Henry David Thoreau

“I’m shy, paranoid, whatever word you want to use. I hate fame. I’ve done everything I can to avoid it.”
Johnny Depp

“If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women basically.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre

“There’s no difference between fame and infamy now. There’s a new school of professional famous people that don’t do anything. They don’t create anything.”
– Ricky Gervais

“Fame doesn’t fulfill you. It warms you a bit, but that warmth is temporary.”
– Marilyn Monroe

“The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do without thought of fame. If it comes at all it will come because it is deserved, not because it is sought after.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Fame hit me like a ton of bricks.”
– Eminem

“If you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are.”
– Oprah Winfrey

“I think I understand what military fame is – to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers.”
– William Tecumseh Sherman

“Fame was thrilling only until it became gruelling. Money was fun only until you ran out of things to buy.”
– Gloria Swanson

“What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.”
– Lord Byron

“A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.”
– Clive James

“Worldly fame is but a breath of wind that blows now this way, and now that, and changes name as it changes direction.”
– Dante Alighieri

Thoughts on fame

They Shall Not Grow Old, Armonico Consort and Timothy West, Yeovil Octagon

THE Armonico Consort brought Armistice Day 2018 to a close at in Yeovil with a concert of contemplative music interspersed by readings chosen and performed by Timothy West.

Directed by Christopher Monks, the popular Consort will be starting its own youth choir at the Octagon in 2019.

Music on the day that marked the centenary of the end of the First World War included a vocal setting of Elgar’s Nimrod, Allegri’s exposed Miserere Mei, Samuel Barber’s Adagio and works by Hildegarde of Bingen, Lotti, de Victoria, Tavener, Carissimi and Christopher Monks’s The Spirit of Tallis. Douglas Guest’s setting of Laurence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen began and ended the concert.

Octogenarian actor Timothy West chose unfamiliar readings that highlighted the camaraderie, subtle kindness, desperation and chilling jingoism of “the war to end all wars” subverting the order of the readings so that the passage about the Armistice continued into other texts, rather than ending the evening – a commemoration but also a warning …..

GP-W