Billie Holiday Quotes (33 Quotes)



    If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.

    I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.

    I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.



    You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling.

    A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

    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.


    I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

    Terror runs for king I said. It is better to explore within. We were apes before we spoke of sin. The cosmos sits on the tip of a pin.

    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.

    Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.

    Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

    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.

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

    So I asked him to play 'Trav'lin' All Alone.' That came closer than anything to the way I felt. And some part of it must have come across. The whole joint quieted down. If someone had dropped a pin, it would have sounded like a bomb. When I finished, everybody in the joint was crying in their beer, and I picked thirty-eight bucks up off the floor.... When I showed Mom the money for the rent and told her I had a regular job singing for eighteen dollars a week, she could hardly believe it.

    Money, you have lots of friends hanging round the door. When it's gone and the spending ends They don't come no more.

    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.

    I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.

    Southern trees bear strange fruit,Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

    You 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.

    Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.

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


    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.

    4. Dianne Reeves She supplies the lush jazz vocals in Good Night, and Good Luck ... Billie Me.

    Mama may have, papa may have, But God bless the child that's got his own

    In this country, don't forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There's no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country it's the worst kind of hell for those who love you.

    There's no damn business like show business - you have to smile to keep from throwing up.

    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.

    I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.

    Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way.


    More Billie Holiday Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Love - Friendship - Music - People - Money & Wealth - Emotions - Singing - Mothers - Chance - Mind - Habit - Countries - Sin - Astronomy & Cosmology - Nature - Hell - Babies - Night - View All Billie Holiday Quotations

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