After me there are no more jazz singers . . . It's a crime that no little singer is back there sockin' it to me in my field. To keep it going, to keep it alive, because I'm not going to live forever.

If you're sitting in that audience ready to fight me from the very beginning, I'm going to have a hard time getting to you. But if you've got a heart at all, I'm going to get it.

You can do anything you want to do, if you know what to do.

If it wasn't for hustlers, gangsters & gamblers there'd be no Jazz. Wasn't middle~class who said Let's go hear Bird tonight.

Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.

Nothing was true for long. In time, everything was deconstructed.

There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with.

This is the thing about fairy tales: You have to live through them, before you get to happily ever after. That ever after has to be earned, and not everyone makes it that far.

I had very good eyes once. Though it's another thing to say what I saw. In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.

All I want to do is be normal. But really, it's other people who won't let me be that way.

A nice thing about war-not that anything about war is nice, I guess-is that while it's going on and you're in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.

We can't any of us do all we would like, but we can do our best for every case that comes to us, and that helps amazingly.

Many people who say they have financial problems really mean that they want more than they need.

You have to learn how to be married. You have to learn to love somebody.