Top 33 Tony Bennett Quotes

My whole premise has been, right from the beginning, that it would take me a lifetime to learn to explain myself as an artist. As you grow older, you learn what to do and what to leave out. You kind of simplify your work and get the same thing done with fewer strokes. It’s pretty interesting to me.

I’ve been so fortunate because I never really had ups and downs as far as my career. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I’ve been sold out all over the world.

Singing is a gift.

Every show is different. The public has always been nice to me. I’m fortunate that way.

As a young boy, I did a lot of foolish things. I made a lot of mistakes. And you live and learn.

I’ve been very fortunate. I’m doing what I love, and I’m getting away with it, you know?

Sinatra invited me once to his birthday party in L.A. I was young, and I felt great about it. But when I got there, the Rat Pack were all in the kitchen laughing their heads off.

Johnny Mercer started Capitol Records, and he brought in Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole. He just let them sing whatever they wanted, and it became the best record company in America.

The high point for me in my career was when Sinatra called me his favourite performer in the Fifties. And I’ve been sold out ever since.

It sounds so simple, but if you just be yourself, you’re different than anyone else.

Singing intimately is almost like thinking into a microphone, so it helps to have the song buried inside you.

The whole music world is based on the young, the very young people.

Nobody has communicated with the public more than Lady Gaga. Ever. I trust the audience, and I’m very impressed. As far as they’re concerned, she’s part of their family. The only guy who ever did that was Bing Crosby, years ago.

Every week, as an 11-year-old kid, I would tune in to what was really the first American Idol-type program, a radio show called ‘Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour.’ The winning group on the evening of September 8, 1935, was called the Hoboken Four, and their spokesman was Frank Sinatra, then aged 19.

I respected Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. Those were my heroes, and they were 10 years older than I was.

Lady Gaga is the Picasso of the entertainment world. She’s very intelligent.

If something is good, it’s always good. You don’t have to change it.

I’d like to prove that if you take care of yourself, you can actually not regret the fact that you’ve become an old-timer, but you can just still improve and actually get better.

I want to try to prove that at 100, I could sing as well as I was singing when I was 45 or 43.

I was taught never to compromise: to never sing a cheap song. I never look down at the audience and think that they are ignorant or think that I’m more intelligent than they are. To think otherwise is totally incorrect and runs contrary to everything I was raised to believe.

I was possessed with a wonderful example of my Italian American family. They would come over and join us every Sunday, all my aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces, and I would sing for them.

Presley is country music, white music. Jazz is black music – it was invented by the blacks in New Orleans. And I’m really a jazz singer. I was impressed with Elvis – he was the handsomest guy I ever met in my life, and a very nice person, too. But the music doesn’t impress me.

In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.

I study nature, and I realize that no matter how much you learn, you can’t top nature.

To work is to feel alive.

When you hear a great two-track of a performance in Carnegie Hall, let’s say, it sounds like you’re right there at that moment. It’s true to reality. And the closer it gets, once it gets too technical, it becomes very tinny to hear notes. It doesn’t sound right. It has to be natural.

The singers who are the most honest are the ones who become immortalized.

I don’t sing operatically, and I sing very intimately, but I still do the scales, and I think in terms of intonation and making sure that I’m hitting the notes right on the head… and having it appear quite effortless.

Never treat the audience disrespectfully.

I’ll never retire.

I loved my mom so much because she had to work on a penny just to put food on the table… During the Depression in the United States, everybody had a tough time. And I was so hurt because she was crying that she didn’t have any food for us for Thanksgiving.

I grew up in an era where the record companies just sold records to everybody, and the whole family bought songs. Today, record companies are failing because they are putting their accent just on the young, and I think that’s rather silly.

For many years, I’ve always been attached to what they call the Great American Songbook, and Kern was a great leader of that because he had the classical training of Europe. He impressed all the greatest composers, like Cole Porter and Gershwin. They couldn’t believe he was writing the songs he was writing.