“Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.”

When everything is together – the band, me, the audience, it’s boss! It’s just like magic.

If you don’t settle for that and you keep fighting it, you know, you’ll end up anything you want to be.

I gotta go on doin’ it the way I see it…I got no choice but to take it like I see it. I’m here to have a party while I’m on this earth..

You are what you settle for.

I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.

I talk to the audience, look into their eyes. I need them and they need me.

You are what you settle for. You are only as much as you settle for.

It used to make me unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn’t know what to do with it. But now I’ve learned how to make feeling work for me…

What we’ve had to do is learn to control success, put it in perspective, and not lose the essence of what we’re doing – the music.

I started singing rhythmically, and now I’m learning from Otis Redding to push a song instead of just sliding over it

Freedom is just another word for when you have NOTHING left to lose.

I think I think too much. That’s why I drink!

You’re only as much as you settle for. If they settle for being somebody’s dishwasher that’s their own f***ing problem.

I read, I painted, I didn’t hate niggers.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers. You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely.

It’s not what isn’t, it’s what you wish was that makes unhappiness.

Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Knowledge is the performer, the Infinite All is the composer and audience.

You throw a perfectly straight line at the audience and then, right at the end, you curve it. Good jokes do that.

For all the best teachers pride themselves on having a large number of pupils and think themselves worthy of a bigger audience.

A work of art doesn’t exist outside the perception of the audience.

It’s not so much a question of whether we’ve shot it through 35mm or digital video; what is important is whether the audience accepts it as real.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?

Honestly I think it was gradual from the first time I came. It’s been a gradual thing as far as audience and response wise. I feel like I was conditioned for this type of impact.

I am still very surprised that I managed to make that film [Close Up]. When I actually look back on that film, I really feel that I was not the director but instead just a member of the audience.