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 sing the songs that people need to hear.

People that can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.

I'm not a bourgeois person, never will be.

When I look out at the people and they look at me and they're smiling, then I know that I'm loved. That is the time when I have no worries, no problems.

The only time that I am really truly happy—when I feel at my best—is when I'm on the stage.

I've gone through so much in my life. I should have been dead a long time ago, but I am still here, and I'm the happiest I've ever been.

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

It feels so good to be happy.

I’ve learned to live with rage. In some ways, it’s my rage that keeps me going. Without it, I would have been whipped long ago. With it, I got a lot more songs to sing.

The music was thunder and joy. Lightning bolts of happiness and praise, foot-stomping, dance-shouting, good-feeling singing from the soul.

At last my love has come along. My lonely days are over and life is like a song.

In some ways, it's my rage that keeps me going.

When I'm singing the blues, I'm singing life.

The two things you can't fake are good food and good music

The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing.

It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual

To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.

To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.