May was young and beautiful, we were legally married, but she was caught in the prison of my skin.

Real success is not on the stage, but off the stage as a human being, and how you get along with your fellow man.

Would it be better if I’d married a Negro woman? Would they treat my child any better? Erect fewer barriers?

Bogart could have been color blind. He got to know a man before he decided if he liked him or not.

All I really had was my talent. Without that I wouldn’t be welcome at the White House.

We can’t answer King’s assassination with violence. That would be the worst tribute we could pay him.

I don’t have many easy songs.

With an ocean between you and your European friends, you have to keep them in your heart.

I wasn’t anything special as a father. But I loved them and they knew it.

There are lines that I know are going to get a belly laugh, but after a few shows I get sick of hearing myself say them so I drop them.

The manic pursuit of success cost me everything I could love: my wife, my three children, some friends I would have liked to grow old with.

I hadn’t been in Vegas 20 minutes when I got word that the bookmakers were offering three to one that Frank wouldn’t show for my wedding.

The success of the Rat Pack or the Clan was due to the camaraderie, the three guys who work together and kid each other and love each other.

Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.

If you want to get known as a singer you hire five sexy chicks and let them fight over you onstage and for the cameras. That’s publicity, man.

I didn’t hate being 60 as much as I had 50.

You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear.

I believed in Bobby Kennedy. Campaigning for him was an attempt to give back something to this country that has given me so much.

My home has always been show business.

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

Marilyn and I were rumored to be an item. We were friends. Nothing more. Marilyn was one of the sweetest creatures that ever lived.

The civil rights movement wasn’t easy for anybody.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent.

To appear on the stage drunk, to have them leave there and remember me making drunken mistakes, that was death.

During three decades, along all the highways of my youth, Frank had always been there for me.

There’s nothing that can match Broadway for stature and dignity.

I had traveled 10 states and played over 50 cities by the time I was 4.

May was young and beautiful, we were legally married, but she was caught in the prison of my skin.

I saw that my image was changing or fading. One of the reasons for taking a break from clubs was to be missed-not forgotten.

I go to temple a lot less than I would like because when I do, people still look at me as if they think it’s a publicity stunt.

When Liza Minelli was a child, she used to sit on my lap and call me Uncle Sammy.

The one thing you don’t want is that stale sound when you’ve done a line so much you can’t find a fresh approach to it. Drop it.

Everything Michael Jackson does on stage is exactly right.

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.

Most orgies that you go to, I have found, most of it is sad. All that wildness, all those laughs were like the shining silver and gold paper on packages, but there was nothing inside.

Being in public with May and the children was too heavy. I was irreversibly tuned in to everyone around us.

A man is not complete until he has seen the baby he has made.

I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and brought my grandmother from Harlem to live in it with me.

When you lose a lover it’s like getting a bad haircut. It grows back in time.

I had more clothes than I had closets, more cars than garage space, but no money.

There are certain romances that belong in certain cities, in a certain atmosphere, in a certain time.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

I’d learned a lot in the Army. I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong that people and their hatred could never touch me.

You don’t swing where you sleep.

Sober up, and you see and hear everything you’d been able to avoid hearing before.

Fame comes with its own standard. A guy who twitches his lips is just another guy with a lip twitch – unless he’s Humphrey Bogart.

Ten million dollars after I’d become a star I was deeply in debt.

Though I love the luxury of the Waldorf Towers, room service there doesn’t do soul food.

I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon’s urgings for me to go there.

Part of show business is magic. You don’t know how it happens.

You can be in this business 50 years and still not know anything about it.

The ultimate mystery is one’s own self.