Ethel Waters Quotes

I have no acting technique I act instinctively. That's why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life.

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

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

There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.

There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals.

I dressed plain, but my partners were always spending more money on clothes than I could afford.

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

I've never been able to feel that there is anything undignified about making your living by the sweat of your brow.

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

I learned early in life not to judge others. We outcasts are very happy and content to leave that job to our social superiors.

I had always loved John Ford's pictures. And I came to love him, too, but I was frightened to death working for him. He used the shock treatment while directing me.

We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.

There had been lots of crises in my life. And there was plenty of spunk and battle cry still left in me.

When I first went on the stage I was 17 and under the legal age for performers.

Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.

I am somebody cause God don't make no junk

We show girls were forced to live in whorehouses in each town, no other accommodations being available.

Though I was excited about the Sojourner Truth play, it was not reassuring to think that my entire future might depend on the success of that one show.

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

In her whole life Mom never earned more than five or six dollars a week. Being without a husband, it was hard for her to find any place at all for us to live.

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