In your autobiography you not only tell an immense amount about yourself – you quote what everybody else said to you. My life, I should say, would have been ruined by what other people have said about what they thought I said or did, on occasions, – if I had let it be. So I am simply wary of saying anything to anybody: It ends up publicly hung around my neck. You know what Rilke said about poetic fame. He was right.
— Ted Hughes, excerpt from a letter to Nicholas Hagger, March 1994Fame, after all, is but the sum of all the misunderstandings which gather about a new name.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin
