When you sing, always tell the truth.
BILLIE HOLIDAYYou can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
More Billie Holiday Quotes
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I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.
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If nobody can learn from the past, then there’s no point in raking it up.
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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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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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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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They think they can make fuel from horse manure – now, I don’t know if your car will be able to get 30 miles to the gallon, but it’s sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.
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There’s no damn business like show business – you have to smile to keep from throwing up.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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The only reason they’re out there is to see me fall into the damn orchestra pit.
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Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.
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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.
BILLIE HOLIDAY