I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel.

If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.

The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn...What comes out is what I feel.

Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way.

I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.

People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.

Twelve-year-olds are eager to turn everything into arguments but don't have the cognitive skills to win them.

You don’t like to talk to people, do you? I mean, slamming the door in my face was a clue that was hard to miss. I’m perceptive like that.

Does your marketing promote the difference between good and bad or better and best?

Whenever God means to make a man great, he always breaks him in pieces first.

Don't be too precious about your craft... there's only 26 letters and 12 notes, and Shakespeare and Beethoven said it all better than any of us ever will

Anyway, stories bring us together to find common ground, to find our way through life together, or just to entertain us, and I am just thrilled to be a part of that process.

The public doesnt care about my size. Its just something for the media to talk about.

Love is giving up your needs for the sake of someone else, in some other words its sacrifice

There are all kinds of other things I could do, things I would probably like, but only acting would give me emotional fulfillment.

I have never compared myself to anyone, but it's hard to resist him!!