When I got through, Duke Ellington stood up and started the applause.

Life is like a butterfly. You can chase, or you can let it come to you.

A fox is a wolf who sends flowers.

The only person who listens to both sides of an argument is the fellow in the next apartment.

When I saw all of the people I have known all these years, when we got together, it was scary because B.B King and I lived in the same place in Nevada.

All of these years that I have been singing, no one has done a documentary about my music as far as I'm concerned.

Everytime I think I want to be young again, I remember algebra and physics.

But of course it's different now, the blues is no longer blues, it's green now.

We are trying to prove that the blues lives on forever and anybody in this place can sing the blues.

I thought the best thing you were supposed to do was find somebody and try to sound like them.

I sang on Church Street, every place that had a stage.

Madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved—or not quite evolved enough—to bear the awful burden of its own existence.

That's why so many stars are making pictures in Europe today. The tax guys are making thieves out of everybody.

You will never be admired without being criticized first.

I've found that wherever there is one cockroach in plain sight, many more are lurking behind the corner out of view.

Notion without intuition is empty, intuition without notion is blind.

Uncontrolled temper is soon dissipated on others. Resentment, bitterness, and self-pity build up inside our hearts and eat away at our spiritual lives like a slowly spreading cancer.

If what passed as nonviolence does not enable people to protect the honour of women, or if it does not enable women to protect their own honour, it is not nonviolence.

If you're not a Christian, you're going to hell. It's not unloving to say that. it's unloving not to say that.

The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is the necessity of having to shoot it twice.

When people believe that every move they make is going to affect their compensation, they tend to get risk averse.