I always wanted to play music and have it be my career and knew this by the age of 12

I started playing ukulele first for 2 years from age 9 to 11 and got my first guitar and got inspired by blues I heard on the radio that turned me on and I started learning myself.

The best artists are gone now.

I just like the blues better than rock 'n' roll

I think the blues will always be around. People need it.

There were a whole lot, I bought every blues record I could find, it wasn't just one or two people. My vocal influences were Ray Charles and Bobby Blue Bland.

T-Bone Walker was a big influence on just about every guitar player around.

I think about legacy a lot, hopefully at the end of the day they say I was a good bluesman. That's all I want.

I just hope I'm remembered as a good blues musician.

When I was about 12, I knew I wanted to be a musician. The blues had so much emotion and so much feeling; if you don't have that, you're not going to be good at it.

My mother played piano so we always had music around the house

There are brown eyes in the world, after all, as well as blue, and one pair of brown that meant heaven to me as the blue had never done

As our heart soars, we fly with it! Let love take you places!

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

People who describe culture and values and how people behave - I've heard people refer to it as 'the soft stuff'-they often underestimate its importance. The soft stuff actually is the hard stuff.

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you're not prepared to be original.

I feel like I just returned a 100-yard kickoff in the last two minutes of the Super Bowl to win it all, only to have my run called back by a flag on the play.

Peace requires the simple but powerful recognition that what we have in common as human beings is more important and crucial than what divides us.

Do not borrow tomorrow's troubles today

Pakistan without Ajmal is like car without engine

Writing improves in direct ratio to the things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there.