Ethel Waters

“There is a great supply of amateur undertakers in show business.”

“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 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.”

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

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

“Somehow, the things my mother wanted to do, the release in evangelism she sought with such frenzy, were transferred to me.”

“There's no hypocrisy in Hell's Kitchen.”

“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.”

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

“You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of a family. Just do your job right and your kids will love you.”

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

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

“We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.”

“The white audiences thought I was white, my features being what they are, and at every performance I'd have to take off my gloves to prove I was a spade.”

“My whole family could sing. My family harmonized without any instruments to accompany them.”

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

“New York is only 97 miles from Philadelphia but was the Big Time as no other American city has ever been.”

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

“No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.”

“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.”