I sing the songs that people need to hear.

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

Ill usage makes the sweetest of us vicious.

Let the good work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good.

Florida, just because you're shaped like some combination of a gun and a d*ck doesn't mean you have to act that way.

It seems to me that we become more dear one to the other, in together admiring works of art, which speak to the soul by their true grandeur.

I gave him a bored look. I had been threatened many times before and had learned that the men who didn’t make verbal threats were the most dangerous.

On a soft snow, even a sparrow leaves a trace; the important thing is to leave a trace on a steel plate!

It was about 5 years after I was baptized before the pull of sin finally stopped.

It’s sad, y’know, what money does to people.

It is either easy or impossible.

Of two evils, choose the more interesting.