“I’m an orphan. But the public has adopted me, and that has been my only family. The biggest family in the world is my fans.”

I fight for other people better than I fight for myself.

In essence, I’m a sophisticated cotton picker.

I’m a dirt person. I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.

I see them in my audience all the time, with the fur coat, a woman whose hand is always out front, or the two fingers are on the cheek to show her diamond. I don’t have anything against that.

When the people who are responsible for our country ask you a direct question, I expect them to accept a direct answer, not to be blackballed because you are telling the truth.

My recipe for life is not being afraid of myself, afraid of what I think or of my opinions.

Aging has a wonderful beauty and we should have respect for that.

We’re not thought of in terms of color because we are entertainers. We are there to entertain you not because we are black, white, pink, or green or gay or straight or because we are Catholic or Protestant.

Relationships can be rather uncomfortable for her. But, as Eartha Kitt, it’s fine. I can accept and reject any time I want to. Do I ever reject? Not really. Although people think I do!

In the ’50s, critics used to say I had a ‘dangerous’ act.

I have a great need for affection from an audience. I don’t know whether this is because I had such a tough life when I was a child.

I was a street dancer.

Innocence is one of the most exciting things in the world.

Maybe subconsciously I feel I was meant to work hard for a living.

Eartha Mae is very shy. She’s scared to be seen, scared of rejection and even afraid of affection.

Orson Welles was one of these people who was defying everything the doctors told him he wasn’t supposed to be doing. He was really enjoying himself when he was eating what he wanted to eat.

We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.

The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease.

I have always been confident in my skills and once the game got going I knew I was probably the best player on the floor most of the time whether it was junior high, high school or college. I knew I had control of the game.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.

Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.

Hitting the bottle again, ever than I’ve drunker been. Or is it drunker than I’ve ever been?

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.