Explore Quotes by Billie Holiday

I don't think I missed a single picture Billie Dove ever made. I was crazy for her. I tried to do my hair like her, and eventually, I borrowed her name.

No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

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

I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years.

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

If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you're out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung.

There's no damn business like show business - you have to smile to keep from throwing up.

I never sing a song the same way twice.

When Lester plays, he almost seems to be singing; one can almost hear the words.

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.

In this country kings or dukes don't amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was the President; so I started calling Lester the President. It got shortened to Pres.

The only reason they're out there is to see me fall into the damn orchestra pit.

The whole basis of my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can't sing.

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.

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.

Singing songs like 'The Man I Love' or 'Porgy' is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck.

The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.

If I don't have friends, then I ain't nothing.

All dope can do for you is kill you... the long hard way. And it can kill the people you love right along with you.

In this country, don't forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There's no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country it's the worst kind of hell for those who love you.

I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.