Ella Fitzgerald Quotes

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

I'm just terrible. At talking. With words.

Suddenly, I don't know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it. - Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.

Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.

I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.

If you worry about how good the art is, you're never going to make your own art.

I think thoughts in my head bounce around in my skull and, if they keep bouncing around in my skull, they get worse and worse. When they come out of my mouth, they make people happy.

We have our own thoughts, and if we want others to know them, we must tell them.

I think I do better when I sing.

I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.

When I listen to my songs, they seem like pieces of music or art, like a painting that you look at. The reality is that, yes, when I wrote the songs upstairs or wherever, I was writing very specifically about my life or a specific subject matter that's very personal. I've never shied away from that. The vocals and the performance that come after the record, I don't think of that as confessional, but the core of the music is completely. It makes sense that people would see that as being the main thing. I guess not everyone is able to speak so candidly.

If you're an actor and you don't act for a long time you sort of think, I wonder if I can still do it.

Like, in retrospect, this whole Mini-Album is about itself, and the process of letting go of the fear of what people will think about the music or of me or whatever and just putting it out there. But none of that was intentional at all.

Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.

You have to let people express themselves in the way that they need to express themselves. You have to express yourself in any way possible, provided you're prepared to live with the consequences.

Speech ... is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking.

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.

I'd always loved movies, but it wasn't some sort of desperate love of celluloid. It was literally like, "I want to write things, and I want people to see them more."

One of the wonderful things about making a film of any genre is that you have dialogue. You can take up a position. If you want to say something about your position, you can just say it. You don't have to spend massive amounts of screen time.

I had no problem working for 15 hours straight when I was producing someone else, but I couldn't do it with my own songs. It took that moment of pointing the camera at myself to realize that it was okay to get lost in making my own music. I think before that I was scared of pushing myself to the point of staring into the abyss.

You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.

I can't think of anything more rewarding than being able to express yourself to others through painting. Exercising the imagination, experimenting with talents, being creative; these things, to me, are truly the windows to your soul.

I think actually singing the words is more therapeutic than just sitting down to write them, because then you are letting it out, and it's coming from your gut.

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression.

They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love