Billie Holiday

When you sing, always tell the truth.

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what’s more than enough.

There’s no damn business like show business – you have to smile to keep from throwing up.

No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.

You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that’s nobody’s business but my own.

The problem is that a lot of the blues stations are late on Saturday night, and like a lot of people, I ain’t no vampire!

The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that’s a problem. Peace and love are eternal.

When you begin to teach jazz, the most dangerous thing is that you tend to teach style…I had eleven piano students, and I would say eight of them didn’t even want to know about chords or anything – they didn’t even want to do anything that anybody had ever done, because they didn’t want to be imitators. Well, of course, this is pretty naive…but nevertheless it does bring to light the fact that if you’re going to try to teach jazz…you must abstract the principles of music which have nothing to do with style, and this is exceedingly difficult. So there, the teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

It was in tune when I bought it.

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time!

It’s like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of.