I never was a child.

- Ethel Waters

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

- 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

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

- Ethel Waters

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.

- Ethel Waters

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

I am an isolationist.

- 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 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 never was coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.

- Ethel Waters

Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me.

- Ethel Waters

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

- Ethel Waters

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

- Ethel Waters

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

- Ethel Waters

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

- Ethel Waters

Whenever I played Columbus, Ohio, I dropped in to see my close friend, a medium who had mysterious powers. Her Indian guide was Mohawk.

- 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

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.

- Ethel Waters