If whites bored me, it was because they bored themselves. They seemed to get little fun out of life and were desperately lonely.

I never accepted the idea that I was all through. I guess no person who has once been a star can do that, ever.

Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.

We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.

I never posed as a saint. I would have slept with a man for nothing if I liked him well enough.

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

My father came back one day and forced my mother to submit to him. He raped her, holding a knife.