Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I wondered what I would do if I didn't have my God to turn to and be able to read the Book He had divinely inspired.
What broke Mom's heart was realizing that her children knew nothing and cared nothing about the better side of life.
Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.
Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.
Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.
I have no acting technique I act instinctively. That's why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life.
When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.
My aunts lived on liquor and seldom felt like eating much. I don't know what's wrong about a kid stealing when he's hungry.
I learned early in life not to judge others. We outcasts are very happy and content to leave that job to our social superiors.
Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.
You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of a family. Just do your job right and your kids will love you.
Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.
I wanted to be with the kind of people I'd grown up with, but you can't go back to them and be one of them again, no matter how hard you try.
Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
Though I was excited about the Sojourner Truth play, it was not reassuring to think that my entire future might depend on the success of that one show.
Mom never quit on me. My only regret is that she didn't live long enough to share some of the money and comforts my work in show business has brought me.
The white audiences thought I was white, my features being what they are, and at every performance I'd have to take off my gloves to prove I was a spade.
Twenty-five years is a long time for a girl to live out of a trunk, and after looking over a few houses, I fell in love with one in Southwest Los Angeles.
In her whole life Mom never earned more than five or six dollars a week. Being without a husband, it was hard for her to find any place at all for us to live.
I had always loved John Ford's pictures. And I came to love him, too, but I was frightened to death working for him. He used the shock treatment while directing me.
I know the most terrible thing that can happen to a woman. That is the gang-up. Men put you to sleep with their drops and one man after another goes in and takes you.
The big compliment came from the beer drinkers who didn't know me. They wouldn't drink or move when I sang. If they had their glasses in mid-air, the glasses wouldn't come down.
After years in white theaters I dreaded working in colored houses. The noise, the stomping, whistling, and cheering that hadn't annoyed me when I was young was now something I dreaded.