You just try to do everything that comes up. Get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, make the time. Then you look back and say, ‘Well, that was a neat piece of juggling there -- school, marriage, babies, career.’ The enthusiasms took me through the action, not the measuring of it or the reasonableness.

The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, dignity.

You have to learn how to be married. You have to learn to love somebody.

OK, boss, I don't mind shuffling, but I won't scratch my head.

God, make me so uncomfortable that I will do the very thing I fear.

You meet all kinds of people that help put life in perspective and turn the horror into some kind of lesson or avenue of awakening that lives with you all your days.

My dream was I was going to be an actor. Racism occurred to me. It dawned on me that I would not be an actor. It occurred to me that I was not white. It occurred to me that being what they call colored, being a Negro, was some kind of a disadvantage.