“The first time I heard Clyde McPhatter singing with the Dominoes at the Apollo I just fell off my chair”

Another one is Eric Clapton. Another one is Phil Collins. Eminem, Kanye West I like all those people.

Everyone felt like they knew Ray Charles and in a way they did, because he was embodied by his music.

The all-time greatest Atlantic group – The Drifters

There are still many great surviving talents: Stevie Winwood. Another great talent is Stevie Wonder.

The songwriters whom we think of being the greatest songwriters usually write one hit and six or seven flops.

The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his lifes work.

A singer’s biographical film should have their music and their voice.

It is a great life, this life of music.

You know you have a multimillion-seller hit – and what you’re working on suddenly has magic.

I came close to signing Elvis Presley. I offered $25,000 for his contract and they asked for $45,000 and I just didn’t have the other $20,000.

At a time when it was very brave to do because Ataturk was cutting off the heads of the imams. And people thought that that was foolhardy of my father.

People like Clyde McPhatter who came out of the black churches – like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin – were all church singers who became great pop singers because gospel singing is very close to the blues.

Ataturk saw where history was going. He really did in Turkey what we are all hoping somebody will do in [Islamic] countries where fundamentalists thrive, that they get somebody today that has the vision that Ataturk had in 1915.

My father believed very strongly in Ataturk. Ataturk was a very powerful man and a man of great vision.

I became a jazz fan quite early and never went off the path thereafter.

Whenever a songwriter writes a big hit, then the next 20 songs they write – no matter how bad they are – get recorded.

I had drawings that were the first time that mathematics was put into visual form.

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

When I took the job as Estée Lauder’s creative director, the first thing I did was go into the archives! I love taking our heritage and making it modern.

It is not the first time that men sell their birth right for a dish of lentils, and thus disown (or repudiate or deny) the best of thmeselves.

The first principle from which stems the moral of about all people at all time; it is summarized in this precept: Love thy neighbour as thyself, and: do as you would be done by.

And the BMA sent a writ my wayWith the very first leper I cured.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

I think that’s the biggest mistake men make on the first date.