“Through music you can become sad, joyful, loving, you can learn. You can learn mathematics, touch, pacing Oh my God! Ooh Wow You can see colors through music. Anything!”

Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” a song that was written for Simone, she confronted the band’s lead singer, Eric Burdon. “So you’re the honky,” she said, “who stole my song and got a hit out of it?

My name sounds French but that’s just a stage name.

How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?

What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.

I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.

Funk, gospel, blues is all out of slavery times, out of depression, out of sorrow.

Once I understood Bach’s music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.

What is love but a prelude to sorrow with heartache ahead for your goal.

Music is an art and art has its own rules.

I play piano, by ear. Yes, I write songs and good ones.

I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.

You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.

My love is like the wind and wild is the wind. Give me more than one caress, satisfy my hungriness. Let the wind blow through your heart for wild is the wind.

I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.

This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.

Birds flying high you know how I feel Sun in the sky you know how I feel Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel And this old world is a new world And a bold world For me And I’m feeling good I’m feeling good.

It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It’s the mathematical logic of being alive.

Sadness doesn’t equal weakness, sweetheart. If anything, it shows the love you have inside of you, and nothing stronger in this world exists.

A joy that hurts with sadness a sadness that is pleasurable a pleasure full of terror a terror that excites an excitement that calms a calmness that frightens.

Glen Hirshberg’s stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content.

Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering.

The saddest thing about betrayal is that it never comes from your enemies.

Sadness isn’t sadness. It’s happiness in a black jacket. Tears are not tears. They’re balls of laughter dipped in salt. Death is not death. It’s life that’s jumped off a tall cliff.

But with writers, there’s nothing wrong with melancholy. It’s an important color in writing.