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

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

I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel.

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.

Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose.

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.

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.