People From Philadelphia

"Modernistic-Abstractionist-Art... consists of 75% explanation and 25% God knows what!"

"I'm done with girls on rocks! I've painted them for thirteen years and I could paint them and sell them for thirteen more. That's the peril of the commercial art game. It tempts a man to repeat himself. it's an awful thing to get to be a rubber stamp. I'm quitting my rut now while I'm still able."

"The whole question of pictures made to order is a darn peculiar form of merchandize. Buyers seem to like the tiresome MP blue, for one thing, and girls having a pleasant chat for another. They must look pleasant like Daybreak and Garden of Allah and not contemplative like Hilltop, Stars and Dreaming, which are not so popular .... There are countless artists whose shoes I'm not worthy to polish — whose prints would not pay the printer! ... I'm beginning to doubt my judgment!"

"I'm suspicious of any mode of transportation that requires a running start."

"We hadn't invented 'Not Invented Here', yet."

"It's hard to lose weight when you're dining on the company's money."

"I'm opposed to any sport that reduces the coefficient of friction between me and the ground."

"I think it's perfectly OK to exploit the moon. Largely for two reasons: there's no life there, and it is close enough and rich enough in resources to be economically useful to Earth. In the final analysis, everything we do in space, if it does not help the people of Earth, all the people, it's not going to happen."

"Even snaky little Vyborg chatted happily with a few of the glowing-eyed young women that clustered about him, Eberly noted. Power goes to some people’s heads; in other people, power goes straight to the groin."

"“Wake up in there!” Fritz hollered. “I’m awake,” said Gaeta. “These days you spend too much time in bed and not enough time sleeping.”"

"He’s so doggone narrow-minded he could look through a keyhole with both eyes."

"My first published novel was written for teenagers, and there were rules laid down by the publisher: no sex, no smoking, no swearing. I blew up entire solar systems, I consigned billions of people to horrible death; they didn't seem to mind that at all. But no hanky-panky."

"“A teacher?” Vyborg gasped. “They got rid of him in Mexico because he was teaching unauthorized garbage. Do you want him teaching his blasphemies here?” Berkowitz’s smile diminished by less than a millimeter. “Freedom of thought is not blasphemous, Sammi. He’s a great teacher.”"

"“The real problem,” Eberly burst out, “is that these regulations were written by people who live in a world that must be tightly controlled. They all share the same basic, underlying view that society must be hierarchical and controlled from the top.” Wilmot felt pleased that the discussion was moving into his field of interest. “Aren’t all societies controlled from the top? Even so-called democracies are ruled by a small elite group; the only difference is that a democracy can shift its elite without bloodshed and give the general populace the illusion that they have made a telling change.”"

"Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to get the other poor sonofabitch to die for his country."

"If astronomy has taught man anything it is the painful fact that we are not special creatures in any sense of the term. Our star is an average one, and the conditions that led to the formation of our planet and ourselves were probably not very extraordinary."

"Consider the history of the earth. Let the height of the Empire State Building represent the planet’s five billion years of existence. Man's one-million-year tenure on earth can then be represented by a one-foot ruler, standing at the very top of the building. A dime placed at the top of the ruler represents the entire span of man's civilization. And, at the very top of the whole wobbly conglomerate, is glued a postage stamp —this represents the length of time since man has developed modern science."

"Behind me, Billie was on her last song. I picked up the refrain, humming a few bars. Her voice sounded different to me now. Beneath the layers of hurt, beneath the ragged laughter, I heard a willingness to endure. Endure—and make music that wasn't there before."

"To hell with Billie Holiday! Come down and listen to me, the real Billie."

"Billie's voice was shot, though the gardenia in her hair was as fresh as usual. Ben Webster, for so long big man on tenor, was backing her. He was having it rough, too. Yet they transcended. There were perhaps fifteen, twenty patrons in the house. At most. Awful sad. Still, when Lady sang "Fine and Mellow," you felt that way. And when she went into "Willow, Weep for Me," you wept. You looked about and saw that the few other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses. Nor were they that drunk. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of the self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own."

"The depth of Lady’s singing has always rocked me. When I first heard her, standing under a spotlight in a 52nd Street jazz spot, swaying with the beat, I was dazzled by her soft, breathtaking beauty. It was the kind of face that made a man want to touch it tenderly."

"In terms of my singing I have sometimes been asked how it all began, and it’s usually been a little hard for me to set the story down in any continuous narrative. From the days of my childhood I’ve been listening to sounds and singers, both colored and white, and absorbing a little bit here and a little bit there. Countless musicians of talent have helped. But it is Billie Holiday, whom I first heard in 52nd Street clubs in the early 1930s, who was and still remains the single greatest musical influence on me. It has been a warm and wonderful influence and I am very proud to acknowledge it. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last 20 years. With a few exceptions, every major pop singer in the U.S., during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius."

"It was a real bitter blues, and on top of all the problems I was having in my own life at the time, I began thinking about what was happening to Lady Day. Brilliant artist, beautiful person—you could pin all the superlatives on her, but there she was, having just been misused again by somebody who didn't give a damn about her, having just been given a hard time by the French public because her voice couldn't do what they wanted it to do on the stage of the Olympia Theatre, there she was, singing in a little club for whatever percentage she could get. I started crying pretty loud. [...] She backed me into a corner and in a cold, dry voice said something that was so powerful, so full of meaning that I'll never forget it. She said "No matter what the motherf------- do to you, never let 'em see you cry." That's the kind of person she was—always concerned about somebody else, always trying to protest the people she cared about. The tragedy was that she couldn't protect herself."

"I have to go back to Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday was such a seminal figure in my life. Everything about her. What a courageous woman she was."

"somebody should do something interesting on that kind of show business woman-Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith-not just their art form, but their lives. It's incredible, that sense of adventure that those women had. And I think that's why they were there in the first place. They were outside of that little community value thing."

"She could express more emotion in one chorus than most actresses can in three acts."

"I think Billie Holiday was a very natural singer."

"There aren't many things in life that I enjoy more than a few lines of heroin by the fireplace at the end of the day. Billie Holiday's soul-stirring voice sets the scene and mood: "God bless the child that's got his own." Holiday herself was an avid heroin user. She was criticized, of course. Her response, according to biographer Farah Jasmine Griffin, was that neither of her parents used drugs and she outlived them both: "Heroin not only kept me alive-maybe it also kept me from killing." I know the feeling."

"Billie Holiday's voice was the voice of living intensity of soul in the true sense of that greatly abused word. As a human being she was sweet, sour, kind, mean, generous, profane, lovable and impossible, and nobody who knew her expects to see anyone quite like her again."

"I would say that the most emotional moment was her listening to the playback of "I'm a Fool to Want You." There were tears in her eyes... After we finished the album I went into the control room and listened to all the takes. I must admit I was unhappy with her performance, but I was just listening musically instead of emotionally. It wasn't until I heard the final mix a few weeks later that I realized how great her performance really was."

"Billie Holiday’s burned voice had as many shadows as lights, a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano, the gardenia her signature under that ruined face."

"Billie Holiday—she was the nicest woman in the world, you know. All she wanted to do was sing. They picked on her and picked on her to get money out of her. You do drugs 'cause you like to, not 'cause it's a life-style. ... They picked on Billie so much. She said, "Miles, come and see me in Long Island." She was in love with one of my kids and his curly hair—he used to ride my bicycle and watch the horse at Aqueduct. She said, "Miles, if they'd just leave me alone; they could have the house—everything." You know the way singers shake their asses now. Billie didn't have to do that. Her mouth was so sensuous; she was pretty and she would say certain words and her mouth would quiver, and she always had this white gardenia and long gloves."

"I once had a drink with Billie Holiday, and I smoked a joint with Louis Armstrong. Those are my real claims to fame."

"When I say poet, it's an arbitrary word. It's a word I use because I don't like the word artist. Nina Simone is a poet. Max Roach is a poet. There is a whole list of people. I'm not talking about literature at all. I'm talking about the recreation of experience, you know, the way that it comes back. Billie Holiday was a poet. She gave you back your experience. She refined it, and you recognized it for the first time because she was in and out of it and she made it possible for you to bear it. And if you could bear it, then you could begin to change it. That's what a poet does. I'm not talking about books. I'm talking about a certain kind of passion, a certain kind of energy which people produce and they secrete in certain people like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Max Roach because they need it and these people give it back to you and they get you from one place to another."

"In Billie Holiday's famous phrase: "Ain't nobody's business what I do.""

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaf and blood at the root Black bodies swingin’ in the southern breeze Strange fruit hangin’ in the poplar trees."

"In this country, don’t forget, a habit is no damn private hell. There’s no solitary confinement outside of jail. A habit is hell for those you love. And in this country it’s the worst kind of hell for those who love you."

"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. If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy. It can fix you so you can’t play nothing or sing nothing."

"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. Everything I am and everything I want out of life goes smack back to that."

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

"Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough."

"Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, and then caught them, prosecuted them for not paying their taxes, and then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs. The jails are full and the problem is getting worse every day."

"... used to win all of Billy [Berg's]'s lindy contests. Maybe he couldn't cut the cats at the Savoy in , but he sure could dance. He was like me when I was a kid, in a way, wanting to make it as a dancer and not interested in singing. And he was a switch on me in another way. My singing voice is clear but my speaking voice is husky; Mel's speaking voice was clear but his singing voice sounded kind of cloudy and foggy. I tried to tell him he had something different in the way of sound and encouraged him to try singing. He never seemed to want to listen. Maybe a lot of other people told him the same thing, but anyway, I was pleased later to hear he was making it. I always liked his singing, too. No matter what he was doing, he wasn't imitating anybody and he had that beat."

"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 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."

"No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music."

"Money, you've got lots of friends Crowding round the door When you're gone, spending ends They don't come no more Rich relations give Crust of bread and such You can help yourself But don't take too much."

"Yes, the strong gets more While the weak ones fade Empty pockets don't ever make the grade Mama may have, Papa may have But God bless the child that's got his own That's got his own."

"Them that's got shall get Them that's not shall lose So the Bible said and it still is news Mama may have, Papa may have But God bless the child that's got his own That's got his own."