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.
Ethel Waters

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

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

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

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

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

I am an isolationist.
Ethel Waters

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

I had always loved John Ford's pictures. And I came to love him, too, but I was frightened to death working for him. He used the shock treatment while directing me.
Ethel Waters

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.
Ethel Waters


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

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

I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider.
Ethel Waters

I never was a child.
Ethel Waters

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

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

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.
Ethel Waters

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

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.
Ethel Waters

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.
Ethel Waters