Quotes from Tony Bennett

What I really search for is something that I really love hearing, something that's my own private game: If I find a song I really like, I try to do a definitive version.

I have been very fortunate to have been able to make a living from what I love to do best - performing and singing for people.

It sounds so simple, but if you just be yourself, you're different than anyone else.

The high point for me in my career was when Sinatra called me his favourite performer in the Fifties. And I've been sold out ever since.

I grew up in an era where the record companies just sold records to everybody, and the whole family bought songs. Today, record companies are failing because they are putting their accent just on the young, and I think that's rather silly.

I grew up in an era where the record companies just sold records to everybody, and the whole family bought songs.

Nobody has communicated with the public more than Lady Gaga. Ever. I trust the audience, and I'm very impressed. As far as they're concerned, she's part of their family. The only guy who ever did that was Bing Crosby, years ago.

The young people look great on television. They're youthful and have a lot of zip and energy, but when you see them live, they can only do about 20 minutes because they haven't got the training to hold an audience for an hour and a half or so.

The British House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.

Mercer was very clever. He knew the way Southerners spoke and put that into his lyrics. But in that whole era, you had the best. Harold Arlen was just fantastic. Cole Porter was better than anybody, and Gershwin was Gershwin, y'know. Johnny Mercer started Capitol Records, and he brought in Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole.

I was possessed with a wonderful example of my Italian American family. They would come over and join us every Sunday, all my aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces, and I would sing for them.

I lived for 15 years in Los Angeles, and I still can't believe that the handsomest man in the world, Cary Grant, and the greatest performer in the world, Fred Astaire, and Johnny Carson, one after another - they were all in my home at different times. I celebrated my 50th birthday with them. Unforgettable.

I loved my mom so much because she had to work on a penny just to put food on the table... During the Depression in the United States, everybody had a tough time. And I was so hurt because she was crying that she didn't have any food for us for Thanksgiving.

Every day feels like just starting out because I still have so much more to learn.

It's a great thing that the United States has given the rest of the world - no other country has given such great popular music to the Far East and Europe. When I play those great countries, a lot of times, the audience starts singing the songs with me. They know them. They love them.

I'll call it a day when I die. It's a wonderful occupation for me. I've never worked a day in my life.

If you follow your passion, you'll never work a day in your life.

To work is to feel alive.

The United States created the best popular songs that were ever written, and from the 1920s to the 1940s, it was a renaissance period. It stopped in 1950.

When the uncreative tell the creative what to do, it stops being art.

I love entertaining people; I strive to make them feel good, and they make me feel wonderful. To explain it simply, I like what I do, and my ambition is to get better as I get older. That's really what I'm all about.

My whole premise has been, right from the beginning, that it would take me a lifetime to learn to explain myself as an artist. As you grow older, you learn what to do and what to leave out. You kind of simplify your work and get the same thing done with fewer strokes. It's pretty interesting to me.

That song helped make me a world citizen. It allowed me to live, work and sing in any city on the globe. It changed my whole life.

I always feel the audience is my best teacher.