“When I played Lady Day, I took Aba onstage with me as a joke. He started singing—in tune!—and the audience loved it.Eartha Kitt, when asked what tricks her poodle did.”

“When my mind plays tricks on me I can deal. But when my mind plays tricks on my mind I can not tell what's real”

“Took me a while to get to the point today, but that is because I did not know what the point was when I started.”

“You asked me once what I see when I look into my future.” He slid his palm down her shoulder and took her hand. “I see you”

“A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn’t want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.”

“I feel that from the very beginning life played a terrible conjurer’s trick on me. I lost faith in it. It seems to me that every moment now it is playing tricks on me. So that when I hear love I am not sure it is love, and when I hear gaiety I am not sure it is gaiety, and when I have eaten and loved and I am all warm from wine, I am not sure it is either love or food or wine, but a strange trick being played on me, an illusion, slippery and baffling and malicious, and a magician hangs behind me watching the ecstasy I feel at the things which happen so that I know deep down it is all fluid and escaping and may vanish at any moment. Don’t forget to write me a letter and tell me I was here, and I saw you, and loved you, and ate with you. It is all so evanescent and I love it so much, I love it as you love the change in the days.”