"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."
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Quote collection
Billie Holiday quotes (page 1 of 3)
51 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough."
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"The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while."
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"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."
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"I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn...What comes out is what I feel."
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"Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain."
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"I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old."
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"I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music."
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"Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way."
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"People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it."
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"I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own."
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"I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been."
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"The whole basis of my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can't sing."
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"Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose."
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"God has blessed you when he lets you believe in somebody."
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"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."
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"When you sing, always tell the truth."
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"I don't think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life."
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"If nobody can learn from the past, then there's no point in raking it up."
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"I think I copied my style from Louis Armstrong. Because I used to like the big volume and the big sound that Bessie Smith got when she sang ... So I liked the feeling that Louis got and I wanted the big volume that Bessie Smith got. But I found that it didn't work with me, because I didn't have a big voice. So anyway between the two of them I sorta got Billie Holiday."
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