Frank Sinatra

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.

May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

You gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.

I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions.

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

I want to keep redefining my work and trying new things. I want my music to be able to fit into any category. I want it to float wherever my heart goes. My music is heart music; giving it any other description is dangerous.

There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can’t go there. So I’m back to Count Basie lifting his hand. And I find you can stop that show with one note just like you can with a hundred.

I’m an experimenter. It’s rich because every album I’ve done, except for a couple of techno-y records, are different. Really you’ve got to hand it to the Fender Strat, because there are songs in that guitar. It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time because it’s forever sitting there challenging you to find something else in it, but it is there if you really search.

I’d take my guitar and play on the streets. A gospel song would get me a pat on the head. But a blues would get me a dime. So you see why I stuck with the blues.

Why Jazz? This is just the way I see music.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

I still love the whole history of Jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

It’s easier to copy someone else than to find out how to avoid sounding like someone else.

You’ve heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better’n I can, play the blues better’n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.

To keep a band together you simply need a gimmick. The gimmick I use is to pay them money.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.