I can't bear to see myself even in movies. The feeling is complex. I can't stand the sight of myself.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

Only time, education and plenty of good schooling will make anti-segregation work.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

I'm a musician at heart, I know I'm not really a singer. I couldn't compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.

Get me well so I can get on television and tell people to stop smoking.

There's just one thing I can't figure out. My income tax!

I'm in the music business for one purpose - to make money.

People don't slip. Time catches up with them.

Critics don't buy records. They get 'em free.

The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you've got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.

If I could read it, I could play it.

It's not the people in the South who create racial problems - it's the people who are governing.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

I was a guinea pig for some hoodlums who thought they could hurt me and frighten me and keep other Negro entertainers from the South.

The only prejudice I've found anywhere in TV is in some advertising agencies, and there isn't so much prejudice as just fear.

The Supreme Court is having a hard time integrating schools. What chance do I have to integrate audiences?

The only sport I'm not interested in is horse racing. That's because I don't know the horses personally.

I'm an interpreter of stories. When I perform it's like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

The sheriff is at the cash register, and if I don't get a hit soon, I don't know what I'll do.

You've got to change with the public's taste.

I can't bear to see myself even in movies. The feeling is complex. I can't stand the sight of myself.

The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

I'm not playing for other musicians. We're trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We'll keep him happy.

Primarily I'm a meat man, although once in a while I toy with a few vegetables.

I often wonder whether Negroes like myself who are pretty well known help out at all in breaking down barriers.

I'm proud of our court. It knocks back a lot of the propaganda the Communists put out about the way America treats her Negroes.

I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen.

I may be helping to bring harmony between people through my music.

Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

The best compliment to a child or a friend is the feeling you give him that he has been set free to make his own inquiries, to come to conclusions that are right for him, whether or not they coincide with your own.

The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.

I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

Then came the choreography... the impact of music and choreography tends to really emphasize an overall feeling of what you really want out of the program.

On that road of the informer, it is always night. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure, because it is necessary.

I was as big as I have ever been. I had a personal trainer and was working out. I was feeling good. I was muscular. I had never weighed more than 155 pounds.

Lately, I can't shake the feeling that I've been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I can't account for most of my 20s, and I have to continually remind myself that certain people are dead now and many of my friends have children.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

Collectively, we must do more than simply watch, with resignation and a feeling of powerlessness, reports on the evening news about the latest terrorist atrocity.

But even if I'm left high and dry at the end of this wild journey, just taking it is a great feeling.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

They must have a feeling of do or die. It is such an overcrowded profession.

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.

But I remember feeling as a producer I felt like the guy who called the caterer and got the band; I had to work the party while everybody else was having a good time.

Faith means living with uncertainty - feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark.