“I always loved Sam Cooke, because he seemed very versatile. He sang gospel, soul, blues, pop music”

When you were a kid, a day was a long time and a year was a long time

Sometimes I sing along in the car, if something good is playing like Marvin Gaye.

Don’t be ashamed to let your conscience be your guide.

I really like listening to music in my car.

It’s a 360-degree sound experience. Like you’re in the middle of the band. A lot of people have the technology to play the format, so why not put it out there. It sounds great.

Until I went to rehab, I didn’t understand what it did.

I was raised Catholic, but my father’s people were Methodist, so we went to both churches.

My voice belongs to me, from God. People will comment, “Your voice helped me through.” Maybe it’s God in me, because I don’t take credit for that.

Me and my partners had been stealing cars for a while.

I owe it all to Jesus.

I think things happened the way they did for a reason

So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I’d like to publish it someday.

Every morning I wake up and thank God.

If you had told me I’d be making 62 tomorrow, I’d say you were lying.

At dances when I was a little kid, Art would be up there singing while I’d be dancing with some girl a foot taller than me.

Growing up my mother played Sarah Vaughan and Nat Cole in the house regularly.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.

Oh, I listened to a lot of the blues. I love the blues. You know, Slim Harpo, people like that, and Sonny Boy Williamson.

My dream as a passionate cook has been to go to Le Cordon Bleu. Never could my most incredible dream have lived up to the experience.

A voyage to Europe in the summer of 1921 gave me the first opportunity of observing the wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea.

I wouldn’t think I would coach again, because it would just be hard not being in the Cowboys’ blue.

Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica.

When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.