Quotes from Sidney Poitier

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

An appreciable number of directors have shifted to lower-cost films, allowing them to be satisfied with a more modest return.

Marriage is no way of life for the weak, the selfish, or the insecure.

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

I cannot be understood in three minutes.

When I set out to become an actor, I had set myself a standard.

My father was a poor man, very poor in a British colonial possession where class and race were very important.

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

My mother was the most amazing person. She taught me to be kind to other women. She believed in family. She was with my father from the first day they met. All that I am, she taught me.

I don't very often read novels.

I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.

In my case, the body of work stands for itself... I think my work has been representative of me as a man.

I get offered work these days.

I had chosen to use my work as a reflection of my values.

So I'm OK with myself, with history, my work, who I am and who I was.

If the screen does not make room for me in the structure of their screenplay, I'll step out. I'll step back. I'd step back. I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it.

I wanted to look at them because I feel, internally, that I am an ordinary person who has had an extraordinary life.

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.

I wanted to explore the values that are at work, underpinning my life.

I did not go into the film business to be symbolized as someone else's vision of me.

My father was the quintessential husband and dad.

True 'joy' is the difference between just amusing ourselves to death and creating 'meaningful' pleasure.

I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life.

I have always been a learner because I knew nothing.