
17 March 2001; cited in Montanelli e il Cavaliere by Marco Travaglio, Garzanti.
2000s - 2010s
In "The Way I Look at Race" https://sinatrafamily.com/forum/showthread.php/46953-Frank-Sinatra-on-Racism by Sinatra (as told to Allan Morrison), in Ebony (July 1958)
Context: In terms of my singing I have sometimes been asked how it all began, and it’s usually been a little hard for me to set the story down in any continuous narrative. From the days of my childhood I’ve been listening to sounds and singers, both colored and white, and absorbing a little bit here and a little bit there. Countless musicians of talent have helped. But it is Billie Holiday, whom I first heard in 52nd Street clubs in the early 1930s, who was and still remains the single greatest musical influence on me. It has been a warm and wonderful influence and I am very proud to acknowledge it. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last 20 years. With a few exceptions, every major pop singer in the U. S., during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius.
17 March 2001; cited in Montanelli e il Cavaliere by Marco Travaglio, Garzanti.
2000s - 2010s
Source: What Time's the Next Swan? (1962), Ch. 1, p. 3
Context: In that wonderful musical show Knickerbocker Holiday Maxwell Anderson defined the outstanding characteristics of an American as "one who refuses to take orders!"
I think that I qualified for that, my chosen nationality, at an early age. As far back as I can remember, an expressly given order triggered instant defiance. My little mind started functioning like an IBM machine; signals flashed in my resistance center, lights flickered around my resentment glands, bell and buzzer alerted all the cunning of a five-year-old.
Strategy and tactics went to work, not to rest till they had circumvented or defied that specific order.
I don't know if that character trait was deplorable or laudable; I only know that I have never been able to lose it. And I am extremely grateful that I was too young to serve in the First World War and too old for the Second; I surely would have been court-martialed for insubordination, and expired in front of a firing squad.
Even today, at my ripe old age, if someone suggests I do something and this suggestion is tinged with an excessive amount of authority, I immediately turn into a bristling fortress of resistance.
Peter Agre's speech at the Nobel Banquet http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2003/agre-speech-e.html, December 10, 2003
Quote in 'Livsfrisen tilblivelse', Blomqvist, Oslo 1929, p. 12
1896 - 1930
"I am not I", from Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems, chosen and translated by Robert Bly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 77
Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html,
“I find a lot of club music extremely boring.”
Gothtronic interview with Iris http://www.gothtronic.com/?page=23&interviews=899
1950
Source: 1946 - 1953, "Song of herself"; interviews by Olga Campos, Sept. 1950, Chapter 'My Painting', p. 75