Jimmy Scott Quotes

I think I'd be a million times more successful and more iconic if I was a singer in the '40s. I'd be allowed a level of mystery, and I think I'd suit that decade.

I think that if anyone bothered to take a survey, they would find a sharp decline in atheism during the winters in Cleveland, Ohio.

It's the most natural progression for me to becoming a singing sensation next. And so many people have offered to be on it. Eddie Van Halen... and Prince, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper will probably be a backup trio.

My goals were small. My goal was to become a big enough stand-up that I wouldn't have to do radio. I could sell out a club, which is like 300 seats. If I got big enough, I could sell before I got there, and I wouldn't have to get up at 6 in the morning to do radio. That was pretty much the dream. I had no idea I'd be playing Madison Square Garden or anything.

You can't see Canada across lake Erie, but you know it's there. It's the same with spring. You have to have faith, especially in Cleveland.

The Brits was an amazing place to get a broad musical education. But I never really thought I was going to be a singer because there was always someone better than me in my class.

Every good band in the world was a cover band first. The Beatles were and the Stones were. Everybody was a cover band.

Jazz musicians are the coolest people on the planet. Can I have some cool?

I think my dream would have been to be a solo artist. But it didn't work out like that, and I also love to sing lots of musical stuff; I was really good at that, I've got a big voice. I dropped into musical theater and really enjoyed it and I sang for about nine years of my career.

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.

Ive never had cocaine. I work in showbusiness and no one has ever offered me cocaine. Can you believe that? It makes me worry Im not always the life and soul of the party that I feel like in my head.

It was not until the Abraham Lincoln administration that an income tax was imposed on Americans. Its stated purpose was to finance the war, but it took until 1872 for it to be repealed. During the Grover Cleveland administration, Congress enacted the Income Tax Act of 1894. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1895. It took the Sixteenth Amendment (1913) to make permanent what the Framers feared -- today's income tax.

All my singles went platinum-plus.All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

He took comfort in the neon signs, the wild strands of jazz creeping out of clubs whenever happy swells of people pushed through the doors in their finery.

When we first started and started hitting new places for the first time, you kinda didn't know, because we were new. Sometimes we played tiny little clubs and sometimes we'd play a larger place.

I'm the one who started spreading that particular factoid, about Bendis, Azz and me all being bald Brian's from Cleveland, just to get my name mentioned in the same sentence as two much-better writers, and it's worked like a goddamn charm. Next up, I'm going to grow a big, disgusting beard, just so people will start talking about Alan Moore and me in the same breath.

NATO was a wonderful idea. It was formed in 1949. We are as far away from NATO as NATO was when it was done in time from the presidency of Grover Cleveland.

I always wanted to be in the world of entertainment. I just love the idea of an audience being happy with what I am doing. Writing is showbusiness for shy people. That's how I see it.

The bottom line is I've never had anybody bark at me in a mall with malicious intent. Everybody who barks at the kid from Cleveland is to let him know, "I know who you are." It's always a positive thing.

I knew I wanted to be in comedy but the path of least resistance was doing stand-up in folk music clubs where I could get on stage. I guess you could get up no matter how bad you were and you didn't have to audition. You just got up. Everything else required an audition and if you auditioned for a TV show, you would stand in line with a hundred other people. But at the clubs, it was okay just to get up, so that's why I started in stand-up.

My first singing role was as Susanna in a school production in a shortened form of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. I loved to sing and I was given lots of encouragement by a wonderful music teacher Mrs Ann Hill and by my parents who suggested I go to drama school.

I kind of knew Cleveland was going to get the No. 1 pick. I think they rigged it. No, don't quote me on that.

So study your rock history, son. That be the Bible of the Blues.

I'm always going to be a singer.

I never said I wanted to be a singer for the rest of my life.