Elvis Quotations

I don't sing to people. I sing for them. I told that once to Elvis Presley. He bought it. After that Elvis sang not to but for the audience. A subtle difference.

What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?

There's this Bruno Mars guy. I met him in Hawaii when was doing Elvis imitations at the age of about five or six years old. There's a lot of old school in him. He's got a depth that I just love.

The Kenyans beat up on the American runners in every road race every weekend of the year, but we're way ahead of them in the number and quality of our Elvis impersonators. We get our X-Men and gorillas.

Most singers have their idols. I remember Elvis Presley when I was a kid. When I was about sixteen, I always said I wanted to do 'Love Me Tender.'

I have an oval-shaped scar on the knuckle of my right index finger from crashing my hand through a light fixture while practicing Elvis Presley moves in college.

Liberace was a miracle. You talk about who he was and what he did, and then you look at who he inspired, from Elton John to Cher to Michael Jackson to Bette Midler. There are so many people that came to see him. Elvis was there, watching his shows.

Elvis was sincere, and he was - he was so loyal. And he was so homespun. He loved his mother, he loved America. You know, he loved his fellow man. He had a great humanitarian philanthropic sense.

Elvis walked over and signed a few autographs over the fence. They were screaming. I had never seen this.

If it weren't for Liberace, there would be no Madonna or Lady Gaga, Elton John, Bette Midler, or Elvis because it was Liberace who helped the King glitz up his act.

When Elvis came out on stage, it became electric. And the way people responded to him was such that, you know, I never saw that kind of response toward any other performer.

A lot of the people I'd love to work with, like John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, aren't alive, unfortunately.

My mom was a huge Adam and the Ants fan. My granddad listened to a lot of Motown and Elvis and Johnny Cash. So I was kind of well-rounded.

The fact is Jerry Weintraub, the handsome, bearish movie producer, the man with the long career, who worked with Arthur Godfrey and Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra and George Clooney, is a great storyteller - he's this as much as he's anything else. He takes time telling stories, too.

Oh, I think country has changed tremendously. I think country has totally changed. Country music when I was a kid was Hank Williams. If you put Hank and Elvis together, there wasn't that musical difference. But as the Beatles showed up and the English invasion, I think country music got pretty far away from rock n' roll.

The Best of Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Hailey and the Comets, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Frankie Laine all topped the charts in the '50s. Load a playlist of rock n' roll royalty. You're spoilt for choice.

If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.

No, there will come a time where I'm not gonna do this anymore. I mean, there will come a time, definitely, where I'll turn into Elvis - I'm gonna be fat and fishin', I guarantee you.

Elvis was a giant and influenced everyone in the business.

To see someone 70 years old with dyed black hair, you're like, 'Hmmm, I dunno. Is that a wrinkled teenager? What is that?' So at some point, I'm going to have to stop doing this. It's gonna look ridiculous. I don't wanna look like Elvis Presley at 60 years old.

One night I saw Jerry Lee, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Elvis for a dollar, if you believe that, in an open-air concert. Presley, I got to meet and go into his house and so forth. My wife says I should quit tellin' that story, 'cause they'll know how old I am.

I like visual images and there are certainly other bands that have strong visual images going all the way back to Elvis Presley, but it's kind of like that's never really been my bag. Probably because I'm too shy.

I was an original Elvis fan. He was the voice of my generation. I was listening to him on the radio when he released his great Sun records with Scotty Moore on electric guitar and Bill Black on bass.

Elvis came along when I was 10. My father gave me a bass ukulele. I taught myself how to play from a book to play some chords, so I was laying down 'Hound Dog' and things like that when I was 10 years old in 1955. That's the way I was. My ear was glued to the radio. I knew right then what I wanted to do.

I don't know any Beatles songs. My dad never listened to Elvis or Sting or Bowie. Any band name that's on a t-shirt, I probably won't know their music, like AC/DC or whatever. I don't know what that is. As a kid, I would sing along to artists like Tania Maria.

I romanticize. I live with the ghosts of Elvis and Frank Sinatra. It seems so glamorous. They were American men who don't exist anymore. But there are ugly things about them, too.

Yeah, and I recently had my first Elvis moment. A gang of young girls was jumping all over me. It was kinda scary. And totally flattering.

When I heard Elvis and his 'Sun Sessions,' I went mad for it. I was about thirteen.

I never look for music by genre. I look for an artist who puts a dependable trademark on things. Like Elvis Costello - he's a great songwriter who presents his songs in a number of contexts. I feel the same about my own music.

It's not like I'm the first man ever to do this, y'know? You gotta go back to Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr. Those are people who've done music well and movies well, and y'know, Frank Sinatra and Elvis and all these dudes have made the transition. I don't know about Elvis, 'bout doin' 'em good, y'know? It's nothin' new.

Frankly speaking, I don't know much about rock music. But I enjoyed some when I was in college or high school. But I stopped listening after Elvis Presley!

People don't realize what they had till it's gone. Like President Kennedy, there was no one like him, the Beatles, and my man Elvis Presley. I was the Elvis of boxing.

Music and fashion have had a kind of incestuous relationship since the Fifties. It started with people like Elvis Presley and pop icons like James Dean. Then it exploded in the MTV days. Now, with the Internet, it's instantaneous.

I was raised on Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly and discovered the Stray Cats when I was 11 or 12 years old.

I was so lucky that the head of my department was an Elvis Costello fan,

I would have loved to have met Elvis Presley, ... He was the King. It's very interesting to me; the way he grew up, the demons he battled, how he handled the pressure and how, after a while, it became a burden he couldn't carry.

My goal is to be friends with Elvis fans; not to make them my fans, but to make them my friends and know that I respect Elvis for what he was. I'm just pretending to be Elvis a little bit.

My dad sat me in front of the TV, and instead of putting on Nick Jr. or something, he put me in front of 'Jailhouse Rock' and all the Elvis movies.

People who want to get publicity just latch on to Elvis because the ride will take you everywhere. I don't want to say that's what this guy is doing. ... You have to judge whether this guy is legitimate.

I don't even look like Elvis. My hair is brown and curly. I wear a wig and sideburns that I glue on. I don't look like Elvis 24 hours a day.

I didn't get to talk to him, I just kept looking at him. Elvis had all this greasy hair and pimples on his face; he played a mean guitar and sang like no one else. I thought he was the coolest guy I'd ever seen. I wanted to be just like him.

Several years ago it occurred to me that we might be lucky enough to introduce our audience to Stravinsky and Elvis at the same time.

I have a very long and beautiful love affair with Elvis Presley. I own every record he ever made, so I have about 150, almost 200 records of his. So much that I haven't even listened to all of them. I see an Elvis record that I don't have, and I'll buy it and put it in my collection.

Guys like Otis Blackwell and Bobby Darin, and all the guys who were writing songs for Elvis at the time, just hanging around, writing songs, talking about music.

I am so excited my daddy's art will finally be shown in a museum. I believe he orchestrated this from heaven. He's like Elvis Presley; people won't let my daddy die. Interest in his art seems to be stronger than ever. I know he lives through all those pieces he created.

For years, Elvis Presley Enterprises and the Presley family have envisioned a project like this. We are thrilled to be able to move this concept forward.

I enjoyed playing with them. Out here, it was a little more like a circus. It's like playing with Elvis being out here with Daly.

I have been around for 35 years. I have met Elvis Presley, Elton John, John Lennon, all the Beatles. I have never ever seen anything like that and I hope I never will see it again. Michael was crushed.

I always liked Elvis Presley when I was younger - I told anyone who would listen that I was going to marry that man. I did'nt realise then that he had died.

He has modified his Elvis songs to reflect conservation awareness.

My own musical ambitions were born when I was five, watching the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. When Elvis Presley burst on to the screen, singing 'Don't Be Cruel,' I felt my first sexual thrill, though I didn't know what it was at the time.

I was always the bad guy no matter what. I mean, even when Elvis was married, you know, it was - it was a lot of fanfare about that, also.

I was bucking a good-looking cat called Elvis who had beautiful hair, wasn't married, and had all kinds of great moves.

Like many Memphians, my wife and I are not Elvis fans. We don't attend any events and give (Graceland) a wide berth.

I saw Elvis oozing out of your pores.

Jimmie was called a hillbilly singer, but that was not his attitude, ... He really had a kind of Gene Vincent attitude and kind of an Elvis attitude. He was a drinker and partied, and he had that joy for life.

I think Elvis loved his fans-I think that's why they loved him and still love him. Fans are very conscious and sensitive to the fact that performers love them.

I think Elvis was dismissed because of his popularity,

James was back there on a vacation, ... He was one of my favorite guitar players. I had written this song ('I'll Make Believe') that everyone said sounded like a good song for Ricky Nelson. I gave it to James. He took it back to Los Angeles and then called me and said, 'Hey, that song you gave me, I played it for Ricky and he likes it. He's gonna record it.' I went, 'Wow.' That was a big deal at the time because Elvis was in the Army and Ricky was the top guy.

My mum was a big fan of E.L.O. and Elvis Costello. She used to play that, consistently, all the time when we were kids. And my dad, he would claim to be a singer... You know, he loves singing, and he used to sing a lot when he was a kid and at parties and stuff like that. So I come from a very party-musical family.

I was madly in love with Elvis Presley. Dad wasn't into it at all, at least not for himself as a performer. He used to say, 'Mr. Cole does not rock n' roll.'

I still have an old painting the Colonel gave me. It was the first time the Colonel had been back to the Hilton since Elvis had passed away.

I think he's a legend in the making. You (media) guys have helped, but he's backed it up with his golf game. He's 24. He's probably going to be bigger than Elvis when he gets into his 40s.

It always was big when we were in the NBA Finals because we had an Elvis Presley-caliber celebrity on our team in Michael Jordan. But the World Series is much bigger. I've never seen Chicago this excited. Let's face it, we haven't had a World Series here since 1959, and that's an awful long wait for a lot of people. Winning all those championships with the Bulls was great, but it would be the ultimate of my sports career if we win a world championship.

We were in the Green Room watching Elvis Costello, and I thought it was pretty good. He still is not that bad. But we were told he was a huge fan.

With the exception of the legendary pink Cadillac Elvis gave his mother, this is as good as it gets.

Where we lack (Olympic) experience, we'll make up for it in support. I've talked to Brian Orser, Elvis Stojko and Kurt Browning for my preparation.

We get people here from Japan, the Middle East, Europe and Africa who have made it a point in their travels to see the place that Elvis lived. We recently had someone from Poland we put on the air and we had to find a translator.

Michael and I, to this day, stumble into things, ... We wrote a book on Elvis Presley together in the 1980s that became New York Times and London Times best-sellers. It was released on the 10th anniversary of Elvis' death. Everyone said 'How savvy the Sterns are.' Do you think we knew the significance of the date of release for the book when we were writing it? Not even.

While Elvis was a country boy who sang 'black' . . . Chuck Berry provided the mirror image where country music was filtered through an R&B sensibility.

The pool always gave people trouble. The pump never worked right, so Elvis ran a garden hose from the kitchen sink to fill it.

The peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich is part of the whole Elvis mystique. He wasn't only the king, he was one of us.

The people are very nice. They're friendly. It's like you don't meet a stranger at these events because you've got Elvis as your common ground.

We discovered that Elvis had left the building,

There are a lot of people not doing well in their alternative rock acts, who are turning around and looking at their friends in Grateful Dead bands, Elvis tributes, who are getting gigs. There was a demand for the original groups.

The real story is that the fans are tied to Elvis by the same loyalty that he showed to them, ... He did show an extraordinary sense of identification with the fans. He had an almost mystical belief that all of his strength -- and his very legitimacy -- came from his fans.

We have been receiving phone calls and e-mails from Elvis fans from around the world. Thanks to the internet, there are now hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who will be able to experience this historic day from their own homes and offices.

Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.

What happens with 'Mad Men,' it's like an Elvis Costello album; I'll watch it, and then I immediately have to watch it again. AMC will play it back-to-back. I have a tendency to yell at it when my wife's not around because if she catches me yelling at 'Mad Men,' then it gets weird.

There are deep-pocketed Elvis collectors that would just go berserk with the right kind of authenticity.

Throughout the '50s, tons of unknown locals came through Sun to record their demos. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis all made their first recordings at the former Memphis Recording Service.

because I'm standing up to stretch, and I hear someone yell, 'Go Birds!' When the play's over, we're walking outside, and I hear a a few people in the crowd go, E! A! G! L! E! S! EAGLES!' '' My daughter says, 'Uh-oh. There's been an Elvis sighting.'

Elvis and I were very good friends. We were such good friends that, on the day that he passed, I was the first one his father called, to let me know what had happened.

Elvis brought out this mothering quality. I cut his meat up for him. I tasted it before he ever had it. I would fix his deviled eggs, cut off the top, put his butter in, prepare all his food as a mother would for a child.

Elvis had to take some risk in order to become a Raven. They needed his first-year cap number to be low, and the deal wasn't going to happen unless we agreed to that structure. That was not negotiable. He's certainly not worried about his playing ability and he's totally covered relative to injury. Baltimore is where he wanted to play.

Elvis has swung the bat very well. If we were to start the season right now he'd be our DH. He's been our best hitter since we got back (from winter break).

Elvis is an icon in Nevada in his own right. It is a very unique day. How often do you get to see Elvis on skis?

The stuff I write I'm very proud of, but I'm smart enough to know I'll never get on the cover of 'Rolling Stone' next to Elvis Costello.

The spirit is always good (on Elvis Day). People can't help but smile when they see Elvis.

And what I've told people today is that Elvis is dead, and I'm not gonna fret over Jesse Jackson's misinformation and confusion.

Andy Warhol was obsessed with the image of celebrities being visual icons. The position of the gun is bold, menacing, and beautiful. Elvis is almost like a Greek figure.

I've not met Elvis or Jim Morrison, but Jimi Hendrix, Johnny and I used to jam at a club in New York called The Scene where the house band was the Young Rascals, so I did get to meet Jimi.

It would be difficult to tell the story of the 20th century without discussing the many contributions made by this legendary, iconic artist. It didn't take Americans and the rest of the world long to discover Elvis Presley... and it is absolutely clear that they will never forget him.

We're planning a tournament to take place during the Elvis Presley Festival. We hope it's going to be one of our larger tournaments, since it happens during the festival.

We're very careful. We only do licensing deals that make sense with the Elvis image.

To some extent, the idea that rock 'n roll used to have this sort of free antediluvian identity, frolicking in the 1950s with Elvis or something, is totally wrong. It's insane. Elvis' relationship with Colonel Parker, his manager, was one of the most possibly corrupt, certainly lucrative, and intense business partnerships ever in rock n' roll.

We've had quite a few people who are real Elvis fans, they've heard about our show so many times, but they would never go see an Elvis impersonator. They finally get talked into it and they appreciate the way we deliver. They come back. That's the best testimonial.

Finally something comes on, ... To me, you know, I thought it was Elvis instantly. The hair stood up on my arms and stuff. I turned around and said, 'Yes, that's Elvis right there.'

When Sirius asked me if I wanted to program a channel committed solely to Elvis, it was a no-brainer. Everybody has an Elvis connection. I don't care who you are or where you're from, you know who Elvis is. This is no gimmick; we're not going away.

Unfortunately, in the music business everything changes. You'd like to stay at the same label, with the same manager, the same crew and have everything stay the same like Elvis did.