Billie Holiday

You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.

One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.

I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.

I joined Count Basie's band to make a little money and to see the world. For two years I didn't see anything but the inside of a Blue Goose bus, and I never got to send home a quarter.

Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.

People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.

I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel.

So I asked him to play "Trav'lin' All Alone." That came closer than anything to the way I felt. And some part of it must have come across. The whole joint quieted down. If someone had dropped a pin, it would have sounded like a bomb. When I finished, everybody in the joint was crying in their beer, and I picked thirty-eight bucks up off the floor. . . . When I showed Mom the money for the rent and told her I had a regular job singing for eighteen dollars a week, she could hardly believe it.

Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way.