Frank Sinatra
57 quotes
Biography
"Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy."
"The best revenge is massive success."
"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."
"What I do with my life is of my own doing. I live it the best way I can."
"I would like to be remembered as a man who had a wonderful time living his life, and who had good friends, a fine family. I don't think I could ask for anything more than that, actually."
"You can be the most artistically perfect performer in the world, but an audience is like a broad — if you're indifferent, Endsville."
"Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I'm honest."
"If you possess something but you can't give it away, then you don't possess it... it possesses you."
"I believe in you and me. I'm like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life – in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don't believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice."
"I'm not unmindful of man's seeming need for faith; I'm for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel's. But to me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and God go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle."
"There are things about organized religion which I resent. Christ is revered as the Prince of Peace, but more blood has been shed in His name than any other figure in history. You show me one step forward in the name of religion and I'll show you a hundred retrogressions. Remember, they were men of God who destroyed the educational treasures at Alexandria, who perpetrated the Inquisition in Spain, who burned the witches at Salem. Over 25,000 organized religions flourish on this planet, but the followers of each think all the others are miserably misguided and probably evil as well."
"I'm for decency — period. I'm for anything and everything that bodes love and consideration for my fellow man. But when lip service to some mysterious deity permits bestiality on Wednesday and absolution on Sunday — cash me out."
"If you don't know the guy on the other side of the world, love him anyway because he's just like you. He has the same dreams, the same hopes and fears. It's one world, pal. We're all neighbors."
"I'm supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I've flunked more often than not. I'm very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don't understand them."
"For years I've nursed a secret desire to spend the Fourth of July in a double hammock with a swingin' redheaded broad … but I could never find me a double hammock."
"Fear is the enemy of logic."
"The big lesson in life, baby, is never be scared of anyone or anything."
"[On religion] I'm for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, benzedrine or a bottle of Jack Daniel's."
"For Sinatra, there was also an androgynous quality, which also makes the youth-middle age transformation interesting. There's also a certain innocence and vulnerability. Something special happened -- when he got up on the stage he was transformed by the gift."
"I think Frank Sinatra was the most hated man of World War II, much more than Hitler."
"It's Frank's world, we're all just livin' in it."
"I did not want to do anything hokey, corny or make a tribute to Sinatra. So when I went in, I felt the best way was to be absolutely honest, rather than hope I could turn the script my way later."
"Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, without fuel — only worse."
"He seemed now to be also the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America, the man who can do anything he wants, anything, can do it because he has money, the energy, and no apparent guilt. ... The man who had everything, lost it, then got it back, letting nothing stand in his way, doing what few men can do."
"Words that warmed women, wooed and won them, snipped the final thread of inhibition and gratified the male egos of ungrateful lovers; [...] for which they were eternally in his debt, for which they may eternally hate him."