Now I can stand up on the stage again like I used to after five years of sitting down while I sang.

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

but the effort of setting the table, heating up the food and then washing the dishes seemed to him tonight a superhuman one.

Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits.

Playing in sold out arenas several nights a week is something I have never experience before. I want to experience that. I want to experience that in my first year and build on that.

What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire.

...That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.

I'm right, and everyone else is wrong.

A lot of people have their own perceptions about me, like I'm very stuck up, so full of myself, you know. But it's not true.

Wealth breeds satiety, satiety outrage.