What impressed me most about New York were its huge apartment houses.

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

I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.

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.

There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.

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

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