Tony Bennett

To work is to feel alive.

One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.

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.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales.

We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

I’ve always wanted a C trumpet on top, to have that same kind of facility without shouting.

Music is to the soul what water is to the body.

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.

Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.

To play piano is a significant part of my life, my existence. It fulfills a very physical and spiritual need for me.

Love songs last because they are about feelings that don’t change.

A guitar is something you can hold and love and it’s never going to bug you. But here’s the secret about the guitar – it’s defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.

Improvisation is the most widespread of all musical activities. Why did so many people spend so long pretending it never happened?

The blues tells a story in itself. It can make you happy or give you a feeling to swing.

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.