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.

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

I want affection and tenderness desperately, but there's something in me that prevents me from handing it out.

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.

Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.

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