Billie Holiday

I guess I'm not the only one who heard their first good jazz in a whorehouse.

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.

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

If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you're out of your mind. There are more kicks the fuck to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung.

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.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was 6 years old.

I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn... What comes out is what I feel. I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it.

The only thing I like about [fishing] is to sit in the boat and eat hot dogs and drink beer and scream when he catches a fish. And you hope that you don't catch any fish, no, I haven't, they wiggle too much. I'm afraid to take him off the hook.

And nosy me, I went and opened [the fishing kit] to see what was inside. And those things are so real, it scared me to death. I must have threw it a mile. You thought he brought home a box full of bugs? I certainly did.

When you're poor and black, you're born into a world that turns your heart into a tin can and anyone who is in the mood swings out and kicks you. You're only a hunk, a black creature in a white world that thinks you're just a skin without a soul.

As mother and daughter yelled at each other, Billie screamed, 'God bless the child that's got his own!'

I was turning tricks as a call girl, but I decided I wasn't going to be anybody's maid.

I've been told that nobody sings the word 'hunger' like I do. Or the word 'love.'

Love is like a faucet: it turns on and off.

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

I never had a mother, a father, a brother, a sister. I had a grandmother, and she was a saint. She raised me. But I never had a mother.

Somebody once said we were a bunch of junkies. Well, I don't know about that. But we sure were hungry.

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

I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn.

I hate to sing. I don't enjoy it. I never did.