You can't fake this music. You might be a great singer or a great musician but, in the need, that's got nothing to do with it. It's how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them.

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

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

there is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.

The stadium is a part of the Yankees and the Yankees are a part of the stadium. That will never change.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

There's a lot of idiots in the world, so live with it.

I signed my deal when I was 11, and the success I had, no one could explain that to an adult, what's about to happen to them, much less a kid. There's not many people around who've experienced that.

Someone who wants to succeed has to overcome his own greed first

Life is so much easier than you think it is, and as you come to understand the way life works, and the power you have inside you, you will experience the magic of life in its fullness.

Build patterns on time with God into your life when your worship leading...Never let your time leading on a public stage eclipse what’s going on with you and God behind closed doors.

I will not be ignored.