The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.

There are no rules, but you break them at your peril.

When you want to move somebody, you have to say to yourself: 'I'm in the emotional transportation business. I gotta move them, emotionally.

The portal into people's hearts is being interested in them.

Stories aren't the icing on the cake; they are the cake!

Nothing replaces being in the same room, face to face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other's micro-expressions.

Language is a more recent technology. Your body language, your eyes, your energy will come through to your audience before you even start speaking.

Truth is a point of view, but authenticity can't be faked.

With a purposeful story, you can change a "wanna be" to a "gonna be" to a "be".

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

In order to travel far you have to be detached.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.