If I'm going to do blues, it's going to be a typical Jimmy Rushing record.

The blues comes right back to a person's feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don't know nothing about the blues, please believe me.

I liked roaming around by myself.

The music business used to carry a certain amount of brotherly love, but it isn't that way now.

This business switching styles can't be done honestly by one man. As soon as he can play his instrument well, he can express himself, and all his life he has only one self.

There's a difference between the blues of the New Orleans guys and anyone else and the difference is in a chord, but I can't figure the name of it. It's a different chord, and they all make it.

It's dangerous to get too far from what they identify you with.

I'm more relaxed when I can hear the beat clearly all the time I'm singing.

Anytime a person can play the blues, he has a soul and he has a 'lift' to play anything else he wants to play. It's sort of like the foundation to a building.

The history of your world is filled with the voice of the victor, the voice of power, although it was not always a voice of sanity, by any means.

We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.

Struggle forms character

A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be thought.

You know, when you engage so much with somebody it seems like the subjects never end. You can actually talk forever, and I felt like that with my wife. And at some point we shut up and got married.

We emphasize our differences by nationality, race and financially. [...] It's our common humanity that defines us.

I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences.

How can depression be real if our eyes arent real?

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

Every day I think about where I come from and I am still proud to be who I am: first, a Kabyle from La Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then a Frenchman.