Tony Bennett

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.

If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.

To work is to feel alive.

I still insist that American performers are the best performers in the world.

Those who wish to sing, always find a song.

You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room – proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.

I heard Mr. Wild Bill Davis. I heard him play in 1930 and he told me that it would take me fifteen years just to learn the pedals, the pedals of the organ and I got mad.

It’s like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.

When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

Jazz music has always been a place where anything is possible.

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

I play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That’s the point now isn’t it?

A musician starting out today should get a great teacher and learn all there is to know about the instrument.

Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.

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.

Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else.

Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.