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

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.

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

I never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.

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

I have reason to be shy. I've been hurt plenty.

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.

I cannot help feeling I would have been happier with a husband and chidren of my own.

Elia Kazan understood my problems. He was able to bring out the very best in me. He gave me credit for my intelligence.

Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.

Asking what I considered an impossible salary when I didn't want to work for someone has boosted my pay again and again.

All the men in my life have been two things: an epic and an epidemic.

All my life I've been prejudiced against wealthy people.

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.