Sidney Poitier

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

The impact of the black audience is expressing itself. They look to films to be more expressive of their needs, their lives. Hollywood has gotten that message - finally.

If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. You simply won't.

A good deed here, a good deed there, a good thought here, a good comment there, all added up to my career in one way or another.

I lived in a country where I couldn't live where I wanted to live. I lived in a country where I couldn't go where I wanted to eat. I lived in a country where I couldn't get a job, except for those put aside for people of my colour or caste.

I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.

If I'm remembered for having done a few good things, and if my presence here has sparked some good energies, that's plenty.

I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida. It was so blatant... I had never been so described as Florida described me.

I'm a good person.

I'd seen my father. He was a poor man, and I watched him do astonishing things.

Mine was an easy ride compared to Jackie Robinson's.

To be compared to Jackie Robinson is an enormous compliment, but I don't think it's necessarily deserved.