Billie Holiday

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

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all

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

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.

I don’t think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.

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

When the music changes, so does the dance.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

I’ve always depended upon my own melodic instinct, instead of scale like formulas.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

Music washes away the dust of every day life.

Those who were seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music.

The radio makes hideous sounds.

Jazz is a living music; since its beginning has expressed the feelings, dreams and hopes of the people.

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.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else? I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.

For me, music and life are all about style

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission far beyond just making music for the sake of music.

The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.

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.