Ella Fitzgerald

It isn’t where you came from, it’s where you’re going that counts.

It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.

Don’t give up trying to do what you really want. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

When we were at the Apollo, Holiday was a block away. I asked her for her autograph.

I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.

I’m very shy, and I shy away from people. But the moment I hit the stage, it’s a different feeling I get nerve from somewhere; maybe it’s because it’s something I love to do.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one’s own.

Change is always happening. That’s one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it’s in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.

The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

Players are coming from other backgrounds: rock, folk, ethnic music. It’s changing Jazz for the better.

I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

I’m surprised Beyonce liked me. I met Beyonce!!

I wrote “Pilot of My Destiny” because of my love of flying. The fact that my brother is a pilot inspired me to write it. I call him pilot. He calls me copilot.

I’m gonna live till I die.

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

I’m meant to be an artist who can stand on my own. That’s my place; that’s what I’m supposed to do.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.