“If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you’re going to the bank to borrow money.”

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

I’m no good with chords. I’m horrible with chords.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

Sometimes the proprietors of the little juke joints gave me a couple dollars. I loved that. I’d go back next Saturday.

There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I haven’t yet done.

Education is the one thing that no one can take from you.

I do it because I still get a kick out of it. I still love performing. It keeps me young.

A guitar is like an old friend that is there with me.

We are here because there are things that need our help. Like the planet. Like each other. Like animals. The world is like a garden, and we are its protectors.

Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but no one wants to die to get there!

I’d rather be B.B. King. That’s the way I started. Let the heavy metal guys play heavy metal, let the others play the other … I try to do what I do better, not get away from it.

Religion began as a natural explanation of the universe. The problem started when people refused to accept new evidence.

A lot of people believe what other people say.

Water from the white fountain didn’t taste any better than from the black fountain.

When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

There’s a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There’s also happiness to it if you want to hear it.

I don’t think any rapper can go back. You can be a car salesman, a bank teller – I mean, really good jobs, and people are still gonna look at you and be like, ‘You used to rap; what happened?’

After money in the bank, a grudge is the next best thing.

I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.

Any time three New Yorkers get into a cab without an argument, a bank has just been robbed.

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

If there was a payment to the bank due, and we needed shoes, she’d get the shoes, and then deal with them guys at the bank. I don’t mean she wouldn’t pay the bank, but the children always came first.

Whether a bank lent one million, ten million, or a hundred millions, they would not permanently alter the market rate of interest; they would alter only the value of the money they issued.