Billie Holiday

You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.

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

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

I’m always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I’ve been.

Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.

Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain.

I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.

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

What we play is life.

When I was coming up, I practiced all the time because I thought if I didn’t I couldn’t do my best.

I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

Music can’t save the world, but can make one a little calmer.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

What have I got? No looks, no money, no education… just talent.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity.

It’s not what they think, it’s about what’s best for the music.

I used my mother’s radio as a PA system. I’d take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.

Find the best teachers, listen to the finest playing and try to emulate that. Be true to the music.

If you’re making money people don’t think you’re playing Jazz. When you’re not making money they think you’re a great Jazz musician.