“You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.”

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been told that nobody sings the word ‘hunger’ like I do.

I don’t think I’m singing. I feel like I’m playing a horn, What comes out is what I feel.

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

And when you’re poor, you grow up fast.

Don’t be in such a hurry.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

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

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

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

Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I’m more interested in, there’s the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.

Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

Never give up your day job. I do all sorts of things, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to The Today Show,

After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

But more important since 1967 when the war was, ended in the defeat of some Arab countries.

Darkness is where we begin and where we end.

He implies that it is possible to demonstrate logically and experimentally the relationship between the proposed means and the ends they are intended to further.

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.