When I die, they'll bury the blues with me. But the blues will never die.

The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.

I don't play a lot of fancy guitar. I don't want to play it. The kind of guitar I want to play is mean, mean licks.

I don't do nothin’ I don't want to do.

I don't think about time. You're here when you're here. I think about today, staying in tune.

The one thing the blues don't get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people's throat so they got no choice but to listen to it.

No matter what you got, the blues is there

It's never hard to sing the blues. Everyone in the world has the blues . . .

I remember back in Detroit, I used to go to the Apex Bar every night after I got off work. The bartender there used to call me Boom Boom. I don't know why, but he did.

I hitchhiked, took trucks 'n' trains - anything that would pick me up. I stopped in Memphis for about six months and they found me and come got me. Stayed about a month an' split again.

Poor people have the blues because they're poor and hungry. Rich people can't sleep at night because they're trying to hold on to their money and everything they have.

Everything that happens to you matters to me.

how often fears come to sour our life and prove, in the end, to have no foundation, no reason to exist

One positive thought is something you can accomplish.

The older I get the more I realize how simple life is and how complicated we make it...

I would love to work with my sister in a movie one day - like play sisters or something like that, because we've never been on-screen at the same time together.

Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.

The truest mark of your success in life will be the quality of your marriage

I don't think so, and that's partly the problem of not checking cargo, and it's partly the problem of biological weapons, which nobody has figured out really what to do about yet.

I do not believe in guilt, moderation or dull pencils.

Other people have qualities that may be better than your own. Let them express them.