Billie Holiday

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.

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

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.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was 6 years old.

Your sound is you and what you really feel inside.

It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.

I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.

If you want to play somebody’s music, you’d better go into his house.

I would’ve loved to have been in a band, but sadly I just wasn’t good enough.

I’m famous… ain’t that a bitch?

With the birth of the first artist, came the inevitable afterbirth… the first critic

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

It’s easy in music to tell what’s good. It’s hard to tell what’s bad.

I heard Mr. Wild Bill Davis. I heard him play in 1930 and he told me that it would take me fifteen years just to learn the pedals, the pedals of the organ and I got mad.

I’m using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable. I feel its the only solution to that particular problem that I presented myself.

If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones.

Hipness is not a state of mind, it’s a fact of life.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

I want a kick to my band, but I don’t want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.