Quotes By Sammy Davis Jr.

Ten million dollars after I'd become a star I was deeply in debt.

I hadn't been in Vegas 20 minutes when I got word that the bookmakers were offering three to one that Frank wouldn't show for my wedding.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

My home has always been show business.

May was young and beautiful, we were legally married, but she was caught in the prison of my skin.

Bogart could have been color blind. He got to know a man before he decided if he liked him or not.

Being in public with May and the children was too heavy. I was irreversibly tuned in to everyone around us.

The success of the Rat Pack or the Clan was due to the camaraderie, the three guys who work together and kid each other and love each other.

You don't swing where you sleep.

I don't have many easy songs.

I wasn't anything special as a father. But I loved them and they knew it.

Would it be better if I'd married a Negro woman? Would they treat my child any better? Erect fewer barriers?

There are certain romances that belong in certain cities, in a certain atmosphere, in a certain time.

I didn't hate being 60 as much as I had 50.

When Liza Minelli was a child, she used to sit on my lap and call me Uncle Sammy.

Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

I had more clothes than I had closets, more cars than garage space, but no money.

During three decades, along all the highways of my youth, Frank had always been there for me.

When you lose a lover it's like getting a bad haircut. It grows back in time.

You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear.

The ultimate mystery is one's own self.

I saw that my image was changing or fading. One of the reasons for taking a break from clubs was to be missed-not forgotten.

The manic pursuit of success cost me everything I could love: my wife, my three children, some friends I would have liked to grow old with.

Everything Michael Jackson does on stage is exactly right.

To appear on the stage drunk, to have them leave there and remember me making drunken mistakes, that was death.

We can't answer King's assassination with violence. That would be the worst tribute we could pay him.

There are lines that I know are going to get a belly laugh, but after a few shows I get sick of hearing myself say them so I drop them.

I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and brought my grandmother from Harlem to live in it with me.

I'd learned a lot in the Army. I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong that people and their hatred could never touch me.