"A celebrity is a person who works hard all of their life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized."

Fred A. Allen

Oh, this is tragic. Celebrities everywhere, it seems, are getting tired of being famous. They're tired of uninvited attention, tired of being recognized in public, tired of paparazzo, stalkers, twitter followers, autograph hounds, picture grabbers and fans of every stripe.

You can hear the grousing.

"Sometimes I feel like a zoo animal," cries poor besieged Kim Kardashian, no doubt unaware that cows are in farms, not zoos. She continues, "I'll be at a restaurant, and someone will put their phone in front of my face and take a picture without saying hi."

Can you imagine? That this might be the logical outcome of inviting people over to watch your marriage/bikini wax/colonoscopy seems not to have been considered.

Evangeline Lilly, a nice Canadian actress, once said, "I used to cry myself to sleep wishing I was ugly because of the way men leered at and disrespected me."

Oh, don't worry, dear. Just wait 40 years. Miss Lilly has been eating those words ever since, of course, but she's not alone. Jessica Biel and Megan Fox are among the many actresses who have complained that beauty gets in the way of being taken seriously. So does talking, really.

Various other celebs have complained about the cost of fame: Justin Bieber has had enough of being hounded, and said to fans, "Don't come up to me while I'm eating." Both Johnny Depp and Kristen Stewart have compared being pursued by paparazzi to being raped. Blake Lively, keen to bite the hand that feeds her perhaps, has whined that Gossip Girl takes up too much of her time. "We shoot nine months out of the year, so there are so many films I can't do," she grouses. And Katy Perry has famously whined, "I'm tired of being famous already!"

It's fascinating that people who seek the spotlight are surprised by what comes with it, but never mind. Nobody wants his private life ruined and nobody wants to be under siege all the time, that's for sure. The thing to remember is that fame and vampires have a lot in common: both involve immortality, both involve squeezing the life out of others to stay on top and, above all, both must be invited in, so complaining afterward about the blood-suckers you welcomed with open arms will always seem just a bit disingenuous.