“All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.”

I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn’t paint.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

Everything I wrote about wasn’t about me, but about the people listening.

I think I see her, please let me off this bus. Nadine, honey, is that you?

Up come a flat top, he was movin’ up with me.

It used to be called boogie-woogie, it used to be called blues, used to be called rhythm and blues…It’s called rock now.

He could play the guitar just like ringing a bell.

Sometime we’ll try and reach for things we know we each want and don’t deserve.

Music is music and I think music people are the delivers, the actors, when they put their music out they want to insert their character in it. So they call it such and such so you know how they live so to speak.

All were artists, playing foolish, having fights and making love as if the rest of the world had no racial problems whatsoever.

Don’t bother me, leave me alone. Anyway, I’m almost grown.

Actually I’m writing as best I can, in order to keep the momentum and the career there, but I want to live.

Could you imagine the way I felt, I couldn’t unfasten her safety belt. All the way home I held a grudge, for the safety belt that wouldn’t budge.

Rock is rock, and, rock and roll, rock is just short for rock and roll.

Back in the class room, open your books, keep up, the teacher don’t know how mean she looks.

Of the five most important things in life, health is first, education or knowledge is second, and wealth is third. I forget the other two.

A world I dream where black or white, Whatever race you be, Will share the bounties of the Earth And every man is free.

Don’t let anyone call you a minority if you’re black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You’re not less than anybody else.

What I’m fighting for now in my work… for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!

I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

We all require and want respect, man or woman, black or white. It’s our basic human right.

The spectral density of black body radiation; represents something absolute, and since the search for the absolutes has always appeared to me to be the highest form of research, I applied myself vigorously to its solution.