Top 60 Fitzgerald Quotes

Whitney Houston and Ella Fitzgerald are my musical mothers. I learned everything I know about true R&B, pop and jazz singing from these stunning performers and unparalleled musicians.

I grew up listening to all kinds of music. When I came up, you would hear people like Marvin Gaye talking about Sarah Vaughan. You would go to a show and see Ella Fitzgerald performing the music of the Beatles.

I’m a Tupac man myself. And my all-time favorite song, Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’

I have always loved creating and entertaining. It started with music, singing. I grew up in a household filled with music – not pop but old-school stuff, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong.

One of my biggest musical influences is definitely Ella Fitzgerald as a vocalist.

‘The Great Gatsby,’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, remains the most perfect novel that has ever come out of the United States. Everything in the book moves as it should, in the manner of a piece by Bach or Mozart.

I can do the vocal acrobatics but I really try not to. I’ve always been drawn to singers who sing it like it is, pure, straight down the line: Ella Fitzgerald, Patti Smith, Carole King. Simplicity is really important to me.

I’m in love with the way that Ella Fitzgerald delivered a lyric. She would deliver a lyric with the kind of clarity that would make you wonder why it was written, and make you think about the writer. I think every writer hopes an Ella of any genre or anytime gets a hold of their work and works the song like that.

My dad was into jazz, so there was a lot of Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington playing in the house, but also a lot of soul, such as Aretha Franklin and Ella Fitzgerald, while my mum liked Prince and Diana Ross.

In America, we have the feeling of the doomed young artist. Fitzgerald was the great example of that.

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

I was a good college kid, all-American and baseball-playing, living in the dorms with a million barbarians. I did not expect to be claimed by Fitzgerald hook, line, and sinker. ‘This Side of Paradise’ – that sweet, sophomoric pastiche of notes, scenes, poetry, and plays – I felt like he’d written the book just for me.

When I heard Billie Holiday’s voice, Nina Simone’s and Ella Fitzgerald’s – there was something about their voices to me that was such a different texture than what I was used to listening to at the time. Hearing those jazz voices were so different, and I think I just gravitated toward it.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. ‘Ingrid Caven,’ by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read ‘Morvern Callar,’ by Alan Warner, every year – I adored that book.

My favorite singer is Ella Fitzgerald.

I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love ‘Tender is the Night,’ and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality.

Fitzgerald was a modernist.

Mr. Fitzgerald, I believe that is how he spells his name, seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

Frank Sinatra changed people’s approach to singing. Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye, van Gogh, they were all part of movements that allowed people to think about their craft differently. They changed the game. These people changed the game.

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

I have struggled for decades now with the fear of and resistance to change – mostly in the realms of technology, transportation, and the ways people choose to communicate. If I had a theme song, it would be that lovely song ‘I’m Old-Fashioned,’ as sung by Ella Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald coined the phrase the ‘Jazz Age,’ and now we’re living in the Hip-Hop Age.

I would say my greatest musical influences have been Ella Fitzgerald and Mary J. Blige.

No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.

Every time you wanted to do something, you’d hope it would score. You’d keep trying and trying, and all of the sudden, something would come right out of left field, like ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’ No one had any idea about that one.

I always liked Nat King Cole. I always wanted to go my own way, but I always favoured other singers like Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald – I loved Ella Fitzgerald. There are so many of them. Nina Simone was one of my favourites – Johnny Mathis.

I was into all sorts of music as a kid. I was very curious about ethnic music and different styles. I loved Django Reinhardt. I loved Ella Fitzgerald. I was also influenced by all the crooners of the day, like Johnny Ray, Frankie Lane.

The album that defined my childhood was probably Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Greatest Hits,’ whereas my half-sister, who didn’t have the same conservative upbringing, was listening to Cash Money and crunk.

Penelope Fitzgerald’s nine novels are thin enough that if you were so inclined, you could take her entire literary output down from the shelf with a single stretched hand. You’d be holding an eclectic bunch.

I’d like to do Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender Is the Night,’ if that ever gets made.

Like, for real, I’m going to be like Larry Fitzgerald. Maybe even more.

Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.

In publishing ‘JFK: Reckless Youth’ almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble myself with the Kennedys. Not because of my portrait of JFK – which was highly laudatory – but because I had described his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, in less-than-flattering terms.

Penelope Fitzgerald never fails to surprise: her language is clever and elegant, her settings are unusual, her characters are unpredictable, and I am always caught out by a line or moment which makes me laugh out loud.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought ‘The Fable’ was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked ‘Tender Is the Night,’ an experimental novel.

The struggle to write with profundity of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person.

My style of singing has always been referred to ‘soul’ singing when it fact it’s more influenced by English R&B Blues Shouting. I’m closer to Led Zeppelin as a vocalist than to Ella Fitzgerald. It was torture dealing with major labels.

I’ve always been attracted to music, and women like Aretha Franklin, Beyonce, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald and Tina Turner showed the path, in a way. They’re all tough women but not afraid to be vulnerable. They made me feel someone like me could do that.

Dear God, please take care of your servant John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don’t compromise, you may suffer.

I went looking for some preliminary information, and very quickly was struck by the sort of way the surface-level knowledge about Zelda doesn’t begin to describe the person that she really is. You know, I had come to the project with the idea that she was, you know, just F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crazy, disruptive wife.

I definitely grew up to Nina Simone and a lot of Ella Fitzgerald. And I loved Amy Winehouse. I loved that sort of soulful singer.

Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe, I don’t like proper dress while working. I like writing in pajama-like clothing, which eases and relaxes me and allows me to connect with the decidedly improper.

I was born and grew up in Fitzgerald, way down in south Georgia. It was a mill town and my family ran the cotton mill. My grandfather was mayor many times and my family felt deeply rooted to that spot.

I was living in New York. Sometimes, our gang of musicians would go to Louis Armstrong’s home and play records. It was a lesson, like going to school at night. Ella Fitzgerald was an inspiration, too, a unique artist. When you had an opportunity to be with people like them, you cherished it.

My father was a very strong male figure to me as a child. He was very dashing, had a wonderful sense of humor and was romantically handsome in the Scott Fitzgerald genre.

When I was 3 or 4, I seemed to be bursting with music. They played Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra in the house, so I learned my vocabulary from song lyrics – I was literally singing before I was talking.

I go back to, like, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Elvis. I listen to everything.

I’m comfortable singing jazz. The only thing I was concerned about is that everybody, even in jazz, has their own style. To me, the queen of doodling was Ella Fitzgerald, and scatting is something I never thought I could do.