Music keeps people sane.

As long as you've got your horn in your mouth, you're developing.

If I can't play music, what am I gonna do? Music keeps people sane. When you enjoy yourself, most of the time the people who are listening to you enjoy it.

If I don't play for a while, it's just like getting hungry.

We were all influenced by Lester [Young]. Listen to the records that he made with [Count] Basie. Nobody's got what he's got. He's still the daddy.

I just take a tune and play it the only way I can. That's it. I don't really dwell on it very much. Some people probably do. I can only say I play it the way I feel it.

Ninety-five percent of my audience was white.

My mom would have liked it that I patterned myself more after Jimmy Reed.

Originality is the best form of rebellion.

I know the well of my maternal incompetence is deep but I am determined to siphon up a calm and breathing hope for him.

In Victorian times the purpose of life was to develop a personality once and for all and then stand on it.

There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.

Through the music I hope to give it an arc that gives it a greater sense of a journey through the set rather than a bunch of songs.

After love a formal feeling comes.

I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that [American troops] have started to commit suicide under the walls of Baghdad. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly.

You know, if you're at home with children, you lose twenty-five IQ points.

The old and honorable idea of 'vocation' is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.

I do not always listen again but if something strikes me, I exploit it.