- [on Oscar Micheaux] Why, he was so impressive and so charming that he could talk the shirt off your back.
- As a child I would go around reciting poems and famous passages, things like that. Things I was taught by rote, or conversation I had overheard and just remembered. I wanted, I guess, to be seen.
- I was never called [the Black Valentino] because we never used the word 'black' like that in those days. [Filmmaker Oscar] Micheaux only called me 'the Colored Valentino,' nothing else. In fact, if you really want to know, I was even lighter than Valentino himself.
- I could have passed for white and left Harlem behind, but I didn't. Maybe that was a mistake as far as my career was concerned, but I didn't do it. It would have been easier that way, passing for white and keeping my past a secret, like others did, but I chose to be considered as colored. You see, I still want to prove that the Negro race is not all black-skinned; we're all shades of the rainbow.
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