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.
We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.
Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
The greatest acts in colored show business had long made Harlem their home and favorite stamping ground.
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.
If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.
I could always open shows, perform through the middle, and close shows.
I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.
I don't care to dress up except when it is necessary or good for my business.
I have always been psychic. The walls of any room I walk into talk to me.
I am an isolationist.
Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.
There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.
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.
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.
All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.
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.
My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.
I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.
Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.
I dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.
I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
When I act I try to express the suffering or joy I've known during my lifetime.
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.
There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.
