Tony Bennett Quotes

Someday, when I'm awfully low, and the world is cold, I will feel a glow just thinking of you, and the way you look tonight.

Life teaches you how to live it — if you live long enough.

I’m the lady by day, and I’m Gaga by night. And I’m always going to be that way, because it’s a testament to your discipline as a musician. I do like to drink, I like to get crazy, I like to go out with my friends, and I like to sing rock and roll. I used to go-go dance! And I like to be inspired by young artists, people like Millie who are outrageously hard, disciplined individuals. But at the end of the day I’m a classically trained pianist and I’m a singer, and that’s what allows the girl that goes out at night to also go on stage with Tony Bennett at Lincoln Center. Because I know how to do it.

But the available light in Twisted River was dim and growing dimmer. The dance-hall door blew (or was slammed) closed, cutting off Teresa Brewer as suddenly as if Six-Pack had taken the singer’s slender throat in her hands. When the dance-hall door blew (or was kicked) open again, Tony Bennett was crooning “Rags to Riches.” Dominic didn’t for a moment doubt that the town’s eternal violence was partly spawned by irredeemable music.

I am not a terribly physical person. Helen wasn't either. We'd never hugged or even shaken hands, so it was odd to find myself rubbing her bare shoulder and then her back. It was, I though, like stroking some sort of sea creature, the flesh slick and fatty beneath my palms. In my memory, there was something on the stove, a cauldron of tomato gravy, and the smell of it mixed with the camphor of the Tiger Balm. The windows were steamed, Tony Bennett was on the radio, and saying, 'Please,' her voice catching on the newness of the word, Helen asked me to turn it up.

So many! Toni Morrison is, of course, the queen of all things literary. I heard her read from Beloved as a work in progress and it nearly stopped me dead. Other favorites: Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, Jacqueline Woodson, Nicola Yoon, Brit Bennett, Ta-Nehesi Coates, Jason Reynolds, Zadie Smith, Cristina Henríquez, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, Ellen Oh, Sabaa Tahir, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Lisa See…and Celeste Ng.

Every muscle in his body tensed for action, adrenalin pounding through his tiny veins, he crept down the stairs, keeping to the corners (where he knew they creaked less). He peered around the bottom of the stairwell into the living room, and there he saw a lean, bearded man, clad only in a loincloth and a crown of thorns. When he bent over the Xmas tree, Tony saw that blood flowed freely from his bare hands and feet. Before the cherubic prepubescent could stop himself, the words flew out of his mouth: “You’re not Santa!

There’s a tap on my shoulder. I turn around and get lost in a sea of blue. A Jersey-accented voice says, “It’s about time, kid,” and Frank Sinatra rattles the ice in his glass of Jack Daniel’s. Looking at the swirling deep-brown liquid, he whispers, “Ain’t it beautiful?” This is my introduction to the Chairman of the Board. We spend the next half hour talking Jersey, Hoboken, swimming in the Hudson River and the Shore. We then sit down for dinner at a table with Robert De Niro, Angie Dickinson and Frank and his wife, Barbara. This is all occurring at the Hollywood “Guinea Party” Patti and I have been invited to, courtesy of Tita Cahn. Patti had met Tita a few weeks previous at the nail parlor. She’s the wife of Sammy Cahn, famous for such songs as “All The Way,” “Teach Me Tonight” and “Only the Lonely.” She called one afternoon and told us she was hosting a private event. She said it would be very quiet and couldn’t tell us who would be there, but assured us we’d be very comfortable. So off into the LA night we went. During the evening, we befriend the Sinatras and are quietly invited into the circle of the last of the old Hollywood stars. Over the next several years we attend a few very private events where Frank and the remaining clan hold forth. The only other musician in the room is often Quincy Jones, and besides Patti and I there is rarely a rocker in sight. The Sinatras are gracious hosts and our acquaintance culminates in our being invited to Frank’s eightieth birthday party dinner. It’s a sedate event at the Sinatras’ Los Angeles home. Sometime after dinner, we find ourselves around the living room piano with Steve and Eydie Gorme and Bob Dylan. Steve is playing the piano and up close he and Eydie can really sing the great standards. Patti has been thoroughly schooled in jazz by Jerry Coker, one of the great jazz educators at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. She was there at the same time as Bruce Hornsby, Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny, and she learned her stuff. At Frank’s, as the music drifts on, she slips gently in on “My One and Only Love.” Patti is a secret weapon. She can sing torch like a cross between Peggy Lee and Julie London (I’m not kidding). Eydie Gorme hears Patti, stops the music and says, “Frank, come over here. We’ve got a singer!” Frank moves to the piano and I then get to watch my wife beautifully serenade Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan, to be met by a torrent of applause when she’s finished. The next day we play Frank’s eightieth birthday celebration for ABC TV and I get to escort him to the stage along with Tony Bennett. It’s a beautiful evening and a fitting celebration for the greatest pop singer of all time. Two years later Frank passed away and we were generously invited to his funeral. A

Singer’s lethal potion is concocted of hundreds of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the buccaneers who continue to try the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul,” Singer describes a visit to Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach spa converted by Trump from the 118-room Hispano-Moorish-Venetian mansion built in the 1920s by Marjorie Merriweather Post and E. F. Hutton: Evidently, Trump’s philosophy of wellness is rooted in a belief that prolonged exposure to exceptionally attractive young spa attendants will instill in the male clientele a will to live. Accordingly, he limits his role to a pocket veto of key hiring decisions. While giving me a tour of the main exercise room, where Tony Bennett, who does a couple of gigs at Mar-a-Lago each season and had been designated an “artist-in-residence,” was taking a brisk walk on a treadmill, Trump introduced me to “our resident physician, Dr. Ginger Lee Southall”—a recent chiropractic-college graduate. As Dr. Ginger, out of earshot, manipulated the sore back of a grateful member, I asked Trump where she had done her training. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her résumé or anyone else’s. Are you asking, ‘Did we hire her because she trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?’ The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why: because by the time she’s spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her.

Most of the theaters in Jersey City and the surrounding area have been closed, demolished, renovated or restored, but nothing remained the same. The Stanley Theatre still stands in Journal Square, completely restored as a Jehovah’s Witnesses Assembly Hall. Originally built as a vaudeville and movie theater, having 4,300 seats, it opened on March 22, 1928 as the second largest theater in the United States. With only Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan across the Hudson River being larger, many celebrities attended the gala occasion. The well liked but notorious Mayor Hague was present to cut the ribbon. Famous and not-so-famous headline acts performed here, including the Three Stooges, Jimmy Durante, Tony Bennett and Janis Joplin. It was here at the Stanley Theatre that Frank Sinatra was inspired to become a professional performer. Being part of the audience, he watched Bing Crosby doing a Christmas performance. By the time the show was over, Sinatra had decided on the path he would follow. In 1933 Frank’s mother got him together with a group called the “Three Flashes.” They changed their name to the “Hoboken Four” and won first prize performing on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour show. Frank worked locally until June of 1939, when Harry James hired him for a one-year contract, paying only $75 a week. That December, Sinatra joined Tommy Dorsey’s band as a replacement vocalist for Jack Leonard, and the rest is history!

Godwin was Andy’s girlfriend in the early 70s. 212 Made famous by Tony Bennett. 213 Originally part of The Beach Boys’ abandoned Smile album of 1966, issued in truncated form on Smiley Smile (1967). 214 Matt Vaughan had programmed for Pulp,

Anyone can learn from Lincoln’s enormous largeness of spirit. Those of us who are performers can look at the public utterance for which he is best remembered and take our own cue from Abe Lincoln: Don’t feel that you have to show people everything you can do. Just show them the best you can do.

Alongside the wide participation in everyday reading of newspapers and magazines, the era of 'mass reading' of books that characterised the period from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century might be coming to an end, replaced by the emergence of a numerically small but influential 'reading class' characterised by voracious participation and high levels of education.

San Francisco is still the loveliest city in the world for my money, despite how they've tried to ruin her. Yeah, it attracts all the weirdos, and some of them aren't harmless like they used to be in days gone by, but for the most part the people are lovely and easygoing, and there is a romanticism that exists in San Francisco that you can genuinely feel as you walk around. The wonderful things about her still remain; the wharf and fabled Pier 39; the little cable cars climbing upward toward the stars; the Painted Ladies of Victorian Row; the thousand or so acres of Golden Gate Park; and the up-and-down streets where Steve McQueen once hopped in his '68 Mustang and chased the bad guys in their '68 Dodge Charger. Tony Bennett left his heart here for good reason.

West was physically on set by nine o’clock Monday morning, but his heart was in San Francisco. He was beginning to think it was some cruel joke that he lived in the Tony Bennett Suite.

He looks out on a raging battlefield and sees error everywhere, and he thinks he can find the truth by avoiding error. —Lerone Bennett, “Tea and Sympathy: Liberals and Other White Hopes,” 1964

During one of the CGI panel discussions, I asked Senator Clinton about implementing ACIA recommendations, and her answer assured me that she was aware of the assessment and understood the science. And during various CGI events, I also met fellow Sophie Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya, who sadly has since passed away; environmental scientist Lester R. Brown; media mogul Ted Turner; and actor Brad Pitt. At the closing dinner, guests were even serenaded by the one and only Tony Bennett. Pretty big deal for an Inuk girl from the far reaches of the Arctic.

We call on the past to say that there was never a time of innocence, even if there were times of deep denial.

My child will go through the world chased by a dark shadow of someone else's creation.

My brown babies may as well have come with a warning label... Warning! Blackness may cause death by sudden gunshot wound.

How could something you had no right to do also be the right thing to do?

... because the goal in the face of terror is not sanity but rather survival.

I realize this may not speak to the experience of other white gay teens, but I have to risk saying this boldly, the closet led me to black music.

These women's lives hold their own horrors, but Morrison knows that there are some horrors that have yet to be written down; that have yet to be spoken aloud.

How far do I go back in time to find that moment when I had faith in the world?

Justice is not guaranteed in the U.S. racial regime.