"We've been working like shrews, staying in the office until between 11pm and 1am most nights, seven days a week...I was actually working on a client project at midnight on New Years' eve."

"Unfortunately, I can't run an HTML help desk in my spare time, because I don't have any."

"One third of my life is spent anti-aliasing this web site."

But don't make all this hard work sound like drudgery; you don't want people to think you're some kind of common laborer. Glamorize your work, give it some romance. In the following example, Siegel strikes a tone that echoes Hemingway as he describes the terrible burden of living up to the demands of one's talent: "You look at your pages and you decide they could be better, so you keep working and working until they are as good as you can get them."

5. Be humble.
Humility is so overused as a signifier of celebrity status, it has practically exhausted itself of meaning. Nonetheless, you should make an effort to exhibit some every once in a while, simply as a matter of form. In an age as media-jaded as this, however, make sure you keep the insincerity level fairly high:

"I drew a little typeface called Tekton that brought me a regular income for the next several years."

"Even though he was only going to announce the 1st (The Spot) and 2nd (Rocktropolis?) place winners, I felt glad to be part of it...I knew it didn't really matter what place I got. It was just great to meet all these hard-working people who were obsessed about their web sites."