Frank Sinatra

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

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

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

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Jazzmen are our surrogates for the unpredictable, our paladins of constant change.

I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.

Ah music… a magic beyond all we do here!

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

Everybody has somebody that they patterned themselves after.

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

Jazz music is the real deal.

I’m always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.

Jazz is all about improvisation and it’s about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you’ll never do it this way twice. I’ve studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.

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.

As soon as it was understood that we could handle things in our own way, it was the thrill of my life to walk out on that stage with people just hemming the band in.

Let me whisper it. Let me sigh it. Let me sing it, my dear or I will cry it.

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.

Nobody has ever been able to define Jazz satisfactorily. This is probably because anyone who was capable of doing so never really wanted to, knowing how much you would have to leave out of the definition.