When you dominate other people's emotions, the time has to come when you will have to pay, and heavily, for that privilege.

Today or any day that phone may ring and bring good news.

I wanted to be with the kind of people I'd grown up with, but you can't go back to them and be one of them again, no matter how hard you try.

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.

Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.

I could depend a lot on my shaking, though I never shimmied vulgarly and only to express myself.