It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.

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 the family.

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.

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.

All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.

Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.