Quotes

You can have a film and have 200 white people working on it, and nobody finds anything wrong with that. But if you insist on having a black crew, all of a sudden there's something wrong.

[on his job as a boxing gym sparring partner]: I always had to fight the guys who looked like they just killed their parents.

Comedy rules! Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, and there are no rules in stand-up comedy, which I really like. You can do anything you want and you can say anything that comes to mind, just so long as it's funny. If you ain't funny then get the fuck off the stage, it's that simple.

I live in racist America and I'm uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do, and I can make a living from it. You can't do much better than that.

I had some great things and I had some bad things. The best and the worst. In other words, I had a life.

It's been a struggle for me because I had a chance to be white and refused.

Everyone carries around his own monsters.

[on the free-basing incident which set him on fire] When you are running down the street.... and you are on fire, people will get out of your way.

I met the President. We in trouble.

[At the 1977 Academy Awards] I'm here to explain why black people will never be nominated for anything. This show is going out to seventy-five million people - none of them black. We don't even know how to vote. There's 3,349 people in the voting thing and only two black people - Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. We're quitting. You'll have to listen to Lawrence Welk.

[on experiencing racism] I was just on the Today (1952) show and they were telling me how wonderful I was and I walk out into the reality of America and I can't get a cab.

The great comics all have a hole in their chest where their heart should be. Somebody yanked their heart out when they were just kids, and they've been spending their whole lives trying to fill that hole. Or kill the pain. I know that I did.

Black people got to look at themselves honestly, the same as white people did. And the stuff I talked about helped them do that. They loved it. Probably some sort of relief to both races that they could finally be honest about their shit.

[During his tour of Kenya in 1979, Pryor sat in a in a hotel lobby] The only people you saw were black. At the hotel, on television, in stores, on the street, in the newspapers, at restaurants, running the government, on advertisements. Everywhere...You know what? There are no niggers here. ... The people here, they still have their self-respect, their pride. [Describing legacy of trip that made him regret "ever having uttered the word 'nigger' on a stage or off it."]

[observation, 1967] I never thought about not making it. But the 'it' had nothing to do with show business. The 'it' I'm trying to make is me.

[on what attracted him to Superman III (1983)]: It was really the $4 million.