And I wasn't crazy about Hollywood in those days.

I was near sighted. I was born myopic, and I got glasses, right after that.

My mother thought Hollywood was a den of iniquity, and people came to terrible bad ends there.

I get on the floor, and I can do things a woman a fifth my age can't do.

And I didn't. That's why my career was very short-lived.

I was taken to concerts when I was six, seven years old, and sat in a box throughout the whole evening.

So I got caught up in the same wave as everybody else and went right out to Hollywood, to make movies.

I was born in New Orleans, and I wasn't allowed to go to the movies.

It was considered oh, not proper for children to go to the movies.

TV cameras seem to add ten pounds to me. So I make it a policy never to eat TV cameras.

It never occurred to me that I looked like a movie star.

I grew up in the 1950s and '60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan.

I am a result of what has happened on this planet - how could I find the art to say that? I can't, and yet, I am drawn to it because of the enormity of it. That seems really important.

I realized I was never going to have any peace with myself unless I made an honest stab at trying to write.

It's not the destination, It's the glory of the ride.

There are no permanent alliances, only permanent interests.

Was it not the great philosopher and mathematician Leibnitz who said that the more knowledge advances the more it becomes possible to condense it into little books?

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

I don't want to be known as the granddaughter of the Hiltons. I want to be known as Paris.

There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.

Sing, my tongue, the Saviour's glory, Of His Flesh, the mystery sing; Of the Blood, all price exceeding, Shed by our Immortal King, Destined, for the world's redemption, From a noble Womb to spring.