If I had done everything I'm credited with, I'd be speaking to you from a laboratory jar at Harvard.

With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years.

As you may know, I have many good friends in the press who, unfortunately, have thus far refused to identify themselves and go public.

Rock 'n roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics ... manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth.

For years I've nursed a secret desire to spend the Fourth of July in a double hammock with a swingin' redheaded broad. But I could never find me a double hammock

I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest.

You better get busy living, because dying's a pain in the ass.