When lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday, cash me out.
Fear is the enemy of logic.
I don’t know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics, but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation.
I would like to be remembered as a man who brought an innovation to popular singing.
Never yawn in front of a lady.
The only male singer who I’ve seen besides myself and who’s better than me – that is Michael Jackson.
I’m just a singer, Elvis was the embodiment of the whole American culture.
If I had as many love affairs as I’ve been given credit for, I’d be in a jar at the Harvard Medical School.
Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars.
There are moments when it’s too quiet. Particularly late at night or early in the mornings. That’s when you know there’s something lacking in your life. You just know.
To do is to be. -Descartes To be is to do. – Voltaire Do be do be do.
I get an audience personally involved in a song – because I’m involved myself. It’s not something I do deliberately: I can’t help myself. If the song is a lament at the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut. I feel the loss myself and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt and the pain that I feel.
What I do with my life is of my own doing. I live it the best way I can.
Rock ’n Roll: The most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.
When I sing, I believe. I’m honest.
You treat a lady like a dame, and a dame like a lady.
It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me.
Now there’s a grown-up swinging town.
Dare to wear the foolish clown face.
Don’t respond to negativity with more negativity. Just put your head down and prove your critics wrong.