“I’ll see a celadon green room in an 18th century New Hampshire house and just fall in love. Colors stay in my head.”

I just don’t want to be hampered by my own limitations.

progress, whatever your definition of it, is not inevitable.

It’s very often the artist who gives a voice to the voiceless by speaking up when no one else will.

The audience is the best judge of anything. They cannot be lied to. Truth brings them closer. A moment that lags – they’re gonna cough.

A human being is only interesting if he’s in contact with himself. I learned you have to trust yourself, be what you are, and do what you ought to do the way you should do it. You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.

I don’t enjoy public performances and being up on a stage. I don’t enjoy the glamour. Like tonight, I am up on stage and my feet hurt.

When I was working a lot, I felt guilty as a parent. I couldn’t pick up my son every day from school, bake him cookies and that kind of thing.

One thing’s for sure: now when I look at Funny Girl, I think I was gorgeous. I was too beautiful to play Fanny Brice.

Love comes from the most unexpected places.

No one should have to conform to some mythical concept of the ideal family.

When they tried me out as a host on TV, I found that I just couldn’t be that gregarious person. I was stranger than that.

I have one son. Of everything I’ve done in my life, nothing matches the feeling of having life growing inside you.

I’ve always liked working really hard and then doing nothing in particular. So, consequently, I didn’t overexpose myself; I guess I maintained a kind of mystery. I wasn’t ambitious.

I still like my antique clothes.

I love things that are indescribable, like the taste of an avocado or the smell of a gardenia.

If I hear a record once, I usually never listen to it again. I rarely listen to music – unless it’s Billie Holiday.

But if I were to take a palette all my colours would be of you.

When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone – it’s possible. But creatively, it’s more like painting: you can’t just use the same colours in every painting. It’s just not an option.

As a person of color, there’s no getting around the reality of its responsibility.

The aquilegia sprinkled on the rocks A scarlet rain; the yellow violet Sat in the chariot of its leaves, the phlox Held spikes of purple flame in meadows wet, And all the streams with vernal-scented reed Were fringed, and streaky bellow of miskodeed.

Aided and abetted by market forces and the laws of supply and demand, he hones his skill to stand up but make sure he’s never counted.

Music is the last true voice of the human spirit. It can go beyond language, beyond age, and beyond color straight to the mind and heart of all people.

People of color, particularly African Americans, feel the stigma more keenly. In a race-conscious society, some don’t want to be perceived as having yet another deficit.

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.