Frank Sinatra

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.

May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

You gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.

You don’t have to live the blues to play the blues.

Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them…

Music chooses her musicians.

I thank you in advance for the great round of applause I’m about to get.

Do it again on the next verse and people think you meant it.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible.

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

The radio makes hideous sounds.

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won’t come out.

Jazz stands for freedom.

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.