Ethel Waters Quotes

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Ethel Waters

Profession : Musician

Birth : October 31, 1896

I never was a child.

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

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

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

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

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

The big compliment came from the beer drinkers who didn't know me. They wouldn't drink or move when I sang. If they had their glasses in mid-air, the glasses wouldn't come down.

Ethel Waters

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

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

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

Ethel Waters

Mom never quit on me. My only regret is that she didn't live long enough to share some of the money and comforts my work in show business has brought me.

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

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

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

Ethel Waters

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

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

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