Frank Sinatra

May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

You gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

I think I’ve tried to stay true to my music since the beginning. It’s kind of hard because of the access and technology but I just do what I do.

The blues tells a story in itself. It can make you happy or give you a feeling to swing.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

I’m always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.

I always play what I feel. I always feel like me, but I’m a different me every day. I get ideas from everything. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.

The popular song is America’s greatest ambassador.

I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress…so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.

When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, ‘That’s just that ole blues singer.’

When you hear somebody with balls, that’s me.

I’ve always liked the Freddie King/B. B. King rich tone, and at the same time, I like the manic Buddy Guy/Otis Rush Strat tone. So I’m always caught in the middle of the Gibson and Fender sounds. If I’m playing my black [Fender] Strat, and I’m in the middle of a blues, I kind of wish I was playing a [Gibson] Les Paul. Then again, if I was playing a Les Paul, the sound would be great, but I’d be saying, “Man, I wish I had the Stratocaster neck!”

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

Anyone who doesn’t give [his debut album, The College Dropout] a perfect score is lowering the integrity of the magazine