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

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.

One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

When I record, it’s this very precious and insular thing.

I have no friends here apart from the dudes at my record label, and I didn’t go to school with no one.

The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened.

Stats don’t matter. I care about winning, not stats. If I score 0 points and we win I’m happy. If I score 50, 60 points, break the records, and we lose.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

In spite of the existence of the Soviet Union, however, the proletarian revolution during the past years has not recorded a victory in any other country.

I hate that my opinions are gonna be on record… that my opinions of other artists are going to be on record.