“You have to sing loud and move wild with all that in back of you. Now, I don’t know how to perform any other way.”

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.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

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.

I always love it when I hear back from kids who say they discovered Percy Jackson and now wear their learning difference as a badge of honour.

Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair; these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.

Patch backed me into a tree and kissed me, hard. I regained my breath. “boys take not everywhere: that was a kiss.

if you had your mother at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.

On a day when these things shall be heated in hell-fire, and their foreheads, and their sides, and their backs shall be branded therewith.

Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.

You don’t have that fear. So why do you think people get stuck in those boxes? It’s that fear of going back down.

I failed so many times and got back up. I got through the toughest times with my family, but I’m still standing.