In His Own Words

“This has too many words.”

--Comment while singing Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In” in 1972

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“If I had as many love affairs as you have given me credit for, I would now be speaking to you from a jar in the Harvard Medical School.”

--Press conference, Hollywood, April 1965

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“If the song is a lament at the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut . . . I cry out the loneliness.”

--Quoted in Whitcomb, “After the Ball” 1972

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“The thing that influenced me the most was the way Tommy [Dorsey] played his trombone. . . . It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or violin--not sounding like them, but ‘playing’ the voice like those instrumentalists.”

--Quoted by Nancy Sinatra in “Frank Sinatra,” Doubleday, 1985

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“I hope you live to be 765 years old and that the last voice you hear is mine.”

--At his last Southern California appearance, Long Beach Arena, September 1993

Sources: The Quotable Quotations Book (1980); Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations (1988); A Dictionary of Musical Quotations (1985); Associated Press Biographical Service (1979)