Ella Fitzgerald

The fabulous places I’ve been, wonderful things that’ve happened, great people I’ve met ought to make a story.

I guess what everyone wants more than anything else is to be loved. And to know that you loved me for my singing is too much for me. Forgive me if I don’t have all the words. Maybe I can sing it and you’ll understand.

It isn’t where you came from, it’s where you’re going that counts.

Don’t give up trying to do what you really want. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

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.

I sing like I feel.

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

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

If you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands …If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit.

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That’s why I wanted the clarinet.

The emotional reaction is all that matters.

Apparently Jazz is now considered high art and the average person has trouble understanding it.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.

If you think it, want it, dream it… then it’s real. You are what you feel.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.