If you sing honestly and sincerely to kids, they will respond with all their hearts.

It may be that my most helpful contributions to music aren't my compact discs but my articles about other great singers of the past for American Heritage magazine.

Thank God for beautiful songs about feeling despair when you yourself are in despair. They really get us through.

Please believe that I do this because I am convinced that my illness cannot be helped for any length of time and I cannot bear to be a burden on anyone any longer.

I have complete artistic control, and I just do my best album every time and trust it to fate.

When I dance, I love the romance and sexiness of it, and love having it be clear to both dancers that the man leads! But the man has to know what he's doing!

Somebody called me a 'bruised romantic' once, and I like that.

If I love a song I hope to find a way to get other people to love it too.

I had no desire to become a singer until I heard Billie Holiday. The first time I heard her on a record, it was a revelation. She sounded like a woman singing about herself.

I'm very happy to have a small, long, career instead of one big hit and then oblivion.

If people don't like it [my music] now, they will.

Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.

Wisely used history can give pleasure and provide us with a useful tool; but we should not become its slaves.

It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.

Even in the most grieving of losses, or whatever sort of pain you're sitting in, we can bear it.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

I don't like a lot of rehearsing.

One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name