My home has always been show business.

Sinatra is the essence of vocal style. This man has an innate quality of knowing what is good musically. You can sum that up best by saying that he has musical integrity. Even when he does a bad song, there's a good quality in the presentation.

I'd learned a lot in the Army. I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong that people and their hatred could never touch me.

You can be in this business 50 years and still not know anything about it.

To appear on the stage drunk, to have them leave there and remember me making drunken mistakes, that was death.

The only person I ever hurt was myself and even that I did to the minimum. If you can do that and you're still functioning, you're the luckiest person in the world.

I've done some things I wish I could erase. . . . I invented mistakes. But the mistakes must be seen in context, and they must be weighed along with the positives.