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

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.

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.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.

Every one is as God made him and oftentimes a good deal worse.

There is no music in hell, for all good music belongs to heaven.

It's better if you have a strong opinion on any talk show.

Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.

When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.

I never read comics growing up. I didn't have money and I don't like to touch paper.

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.

We ought first to know that there are no good works except those which God has commanded, even as there is no sin except that which God has forbidden.

Men make their own history; but they make it under given conditions, and they become entangled thereby in a fate which is in part the result of other men having made their own history earlier.

You... and only you choose your thoughts.