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.
BILLIE HOLIDAYA kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.
More Billie Holiday Quotes
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If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.
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I never hurt nobody but myself and that’s nobody’s business but my own.
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Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain.
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I’m always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I’ve been.
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I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel.
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Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.
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The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy … it’s sort of a mixed up thing. You just have to feel it.
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People don’t understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.
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When Lester plays, he almost seems to be singing; one can almost hear the words.
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And when you’re poor, you grow up fast.
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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.
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Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what’s more than enough.
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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.
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Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.
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I don’t think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.
BILLIE HOLIDAY