Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.
Nothing can beat the smell of dew and flowers and the odor that comes out of the earth when the sun goes down.
We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.
It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
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.
I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.
Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
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.
Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.
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.
Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.
There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.
I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.
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.
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.
There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.
Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.
I never was a child.
