I'm not starry eyed, and I'm not money crazy.

My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I'd like to think I did that.

Long as I was riding in a big Cadillac and dressed nice and had plenty of food, that's all I cared about.

The two things you can't fake are good food and good music

All the things I used to like - cookies, ice cream, gumbo - I don't like anymore.

What happens is, when I perform, I'm somewhere else. I go back in time and get in touch with who I really am. I forget my troubles, my worries.

At last my love has come along. My lonely days are over and life is like a song.

I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.

A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.

When I sing for myself, I probably sing for anyone who has any kind of hurt, any kind of bad feelings, good feelings, ups and downs, highs and lows, that kind of thing.

I want a Sunday kind of love A love to last past Saturday night And I’d like to know it’s more than love at first sight

Let me be strong, for to be anything else is to languish in the abyss of compromise and to descend to places of impoverishment so destitute that they will squelch my soul and crush my heart.

Your pride will be uprooted when a person who insults you appears to be your benefactor. The person who insults should be considered a benefactor, instead people get depressed when they are insulted.

High altitude astronomy is a strange world of oxygen starvation, sleep deprivation and radiation sickness.

Loyalty is the pledge of truth to oneself and others.

If you really want things to change, you have to get involved. Little strokes fell big oaks, you know.

Love is strange mutual agreement in which qualities of one person gets sopped up by another person...

'Healing, ' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

If you live your life all out today, not only is it fun, but you are preventing a midlife crisis.

I feel like I've been a Yankee my whole life.

I don't see myself as a pure fashion designer sending dress after dress down the runway but about wanting those watching my shows to aspire to a certain lifestyle.