A biography for Sidney Poitierhasn’t been written yet.
“I sometimes like the pictures photographers take of me.”
“I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words - and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.”
“My wife collects knickknacks.”
“So I'm OK with myself, with history, my work, who I am and who I was.”
“We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists... in the loved one, perfection.”
“The impact of the black audience is expressing itself. They look to films to be more expressive of their needs, their lives. Hollywood has gotten that message - finally.”
“I'm going to quit writing.”
“I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.”
“I come from a great family. I've seen family life and I know how wonderful, how nurturing, and how wonderful it can be.”
“I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else's vision of me.”
“So much of life, it seems, is determined by pure randomness.”
“I was not the kind of a principal player that was so in demand that eight or 10 or 12 scripts came per month.”
“In my case, the body of work stands for itself... I think my work has been representative of me as a man.”
“I learned to hear silence. That's the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters.”
“I had to satisfy the action fans, the romantic fans, the intellectual fans. It was a terrific burden.”
“I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life.”
“My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that's my dad. And he was a very good man.”
“My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.”
“I get offered work these days.”
“My father was a certain kind of man - I saw how he treated my mother and his family and how he treated strangers. And I vowed I would never make a film that would not reflect properly on my father's name.”