You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.

Billie Holiday (1915-1959) American jazz singer and songwriter [b. Eleanora Harris]
Lady Sings the Blues (1956) [with William Duffy]
    (Source)

Part of the in-concert narration that New York Times writer Gilbert Millstein used for the live recordings of Holiday's Carnegie Hall records in Nov. 1956.