If I don't have friends then I ain't nothing.

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.

The music has teased and tickled me in an empty space that the most vacuous.

Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There's no looking at a building after seeing Italy.

The failures and successes are necessary for learning.

Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.

It's always easier to apologize for something you've already done than to get approval for it in advance.

We want our sound to go into the soul of the audience, and see if it can awaken some little thing in their minds... 'Cause there are so many sleeping people.

The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.

A wedding invitation is a gift subpoena.

One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.

In the silence between your heartbeat bides a summons. Do you hear it? Name it if you must, or leave it forever nameless, but why pretend it is not there?