“I get outa that bed every day, see? I make a good salary and my horn still sounds good. And I feel good. So I don’t think nobody in the world any richer than I am. Musicians don’t retire. They stop when there’s no more work. We never thought about that in New Orleans. Like we say there, ‘That our hustle,’ you know, a day’s work. But anybody sit down with their money and look at the four walls, they don’t live long; they die. There’s nothin’ I can say other than I’ve set myself up to be a happy man. And—I made it.”
Louis Armstrong (quoted in Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years)