The manic pursuit of success cost me everything I could love: my wife, my three children, some friends I would have liked to grow old with.

I've done some things I wish I could erase. . . . I invented mistakes. But the mistakes must be seen in context, and they must be weighed along with the positives.

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to get insulted.

The ultimate mystery is one's own self.

I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and brought my grandmother from Harlem to live in it with me.

To appear on the stage drunk, to have them leave there and remember me making drunken mistakes, that was death.

Imitations only better the original.