The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy ... it's sort of a mixed up thing. You just have to feel it.

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.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

It’s a great day to write a best-seller.

alone but trying to survive alone.

Ask not that events should happen as you will but let your will be that events should happen as they do and you shall have peace.

The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.

Jackson was not a religious man when he came to Lexington.

Your voice is your tool and represents you. It's very important to have a good voice where you can be understood.

Our hope will never be found in the efforts of man, but in Jesus Christ alone.

I always believed in God, I would go to mass most of the time, but I had no idea of the calling to holiness.

Even the best of friends need time apart.