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

When you sing, always tell the truth.

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.

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.

I can only sing songs my way. I don’t know any other way.

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.

God has blessed you when he lets you believe in somebody.

Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.

I never sing a song the same way twice.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

If nobody can learn from the past, then there’s no point in raking it up.

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.

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.

Lust may be in the heart, though it be not seen by others; as guests may be in the house, though they look not out at the windows.

Them that’s got shall get, Them that’s not shall lose. So the Bible says, And it still is news. Mama may have, Papa may have, But God bless the child that’s got his own.

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

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.

Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.

A well-disciplined mindset allows you to handle every punch life throws at you that much better.

They talked us into buying candy bars and throwing the candy away and eating the wrapper.

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

Do not be afraid to throw yourself on the Lord!

This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then but they were not roses.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

People throw stones at you and you convert them into milestones.