Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich.

The blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll.

Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.

I stone got crazy when I saw somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn.

If you got something you don't want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.

Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that VOICE and it was my own VOICE.

My blues are so simple, but so few people can play it right

At night in the country, you'd be surprised how that music carries. You could hear my guitar way before you get to the house, and you could hear the peoples hollerin' and screamin'.

I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.

I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.

I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.

If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs, " then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.

When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy... you can bet he's worried either about his story or his ability to tell it.

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.

You build a character, a shell, and if you build it right, something comes to live inside it.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of.

I need to give affection and love, because without that, I wither. I need to give that love to someone. Without that, I'm rudderless.

I used to go out with actresses and other female impersonators.

Within my body are all the sacred places of the world, and the most profound pilgrimage I can ever make is within my own body.

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy.