“New Orleans is the only city in the world you go in to buy a pair of nylon stockings they want to know your head size.”

I never sing a song the same way twice.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

If nobody can learn from the past, then there’s no point in raking it up.

I joined Count Basie’s band to make a little money and to see the world. For two years I didn’t see anything but the inside of a Blue Goose bus, and I never got to send home a quarter.

In this country kings or dukes don’t amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was the President; so I started calling Lester the President. It got shortened to Pres.

Lust may be in the heart, though it be not seen by others; as guests may be in the house, though they look not out at the windows.

Them that’s got shall get, Them that’s not shall lose. So the Bible says, And it still is news. Mama may have, Papa may have, But God bless the child that’s got his own.

I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel.

If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.

One day a whole damn song fell into place in my head.

People don’t understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.

I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.

If I don’t have friends, then I ain’t nothing.

God bless the child that’s got his own.

The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy … it’s sort of a mixed up thing. You just have to feel it.

I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.

It’s psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you’re trying to depict.

I did an Extreme video, which was really weird having them here. I did “Get the Funk Out”.

Not quite a science yet, but when someone’s making something weird, I like to know about it.

There is this weird thing that happens, when you stop worrying so much about what other people think of you…you suddenly start seeing what you think of you.

Maybe it’s weird, but I don’t feel in any way, shape or form that I’m taking over his show.

The physician must give heed to the region in which the patient lives, that is to say, to its type and peculiarities.

Go over and over your beads, paint weird designs on your forehead, wear your hear matted, long, and ostentatious, but when deep inside you there is a loaded gun, how can you have God?