"If you really want to know someone, you must see their emotions off guard. That's how I know Joan Crawford could never have been cruel to her children. I really knew her, when she was still Billie, as she liked to be called in the early days. In a relationship as close as ours, I had the chance to see her in every kind of personal situation."

"I was a shy, awkward sort of a boy and my father's frequent absences from home, along with my hero worship for him, made me even shyer."

"I never tried to emulate my father. Anyone trying to do that would be a second-rate carbon copy."

"I never kissed my father until he was on his death bed."

"It is legal because I wish it."

"That was the big thing when I was growing up, singing on the radio. The extent of my dream was to sing on the radio station in Memphis. Even when I got out of the Air Force in 1954, I came right back to Memphis and started knocking on doors at the radio station."

"Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves."

"If I agree to dispose of any part of our land to the white people I would feel guilty of taking food away from our children's mouths, and I do not wish to be that mean."