Billie Holiday

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

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

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

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

When you sing, always tell the truth.

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

Jazz is America’s classical music.

A Jazz Diet will make you hipper, thinner, taller, smarter, richer, happier and more attractive to members of both sexes.

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

Living is easy with eyes closed.

I wanted to sustain a note like a singer. I wanted to phrase a note like a saxist. By bending the strings, by trilling my hand – and I have big fat hands – I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato. I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions. By fooling with the feedback between my amplifier and instrument, I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy or sad, bouncy or bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing.

I think I was supposed to play Jazz.

Music is the tool to express life – and all that makes a difference.

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.

In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.

To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel not the way others think you should feel.

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet.

Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.

I decided that I would be one of the biggest new names; and I actually had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it, ‘Count Basie. Beware, the Count is Here.

You can’t explain Jazz to anyone without losing the experience because it’s feeling, not words.