“I watched Elvis Presley become – I listened to Elvis Presley. I watched Chuck Berry become. I listened to Little Richard.”

Until my knee said, “Uh-uh,” I was jogging. Then I started walking. They don’t like walking a lot, but I’ll push them.

A very few minutes, because seven days later I was in the studio, and eight days later, I was no the stage.

You really have to count your blessings and you have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the blues.

My dad graduated seminary there, and so did (sounds like) Mark Kimball’s grandfather. They sang in a quartet together, my dad and Mark Kimball’s grandfather.

The ones that you sing when you’re driving in the car and as a singer you always go back to them.

A couple of incidents of shortness of breath and checked myself into a hospital, but that one in France really sat me down for a few minutes.

Let that get you up in the morning and put the light in your eyes. I’m telling you, it makes you a better husband, mother, father, neighbor, citizen.

I discovered is that I have a couple of valves that were leaky and had been giving, gave me a problem then. But I hadn’t noticed anything up until then.

Every day is Thanksgiving for me, man. Yeah, I still have an audience, and they ask the local promoter, “When is Al coming back?”

It’s all background experience and listening and exposure.

I would still be singing, because it’s part of my heart and my soul, and it lifts me up.

and I was listening. I started singing, warmer than a summer night, at seven or eight years old.

I did a concert at five years old in the garden of one of the church members, and we raised some money to buy a new piano in our little church.

These songs are old friends I have entertained myself with when I’m washing the dishes, driving to the store and walking down the aisles.

Once you discover that you can, then you must. And it’s not easy. You have to take direct steps.

Al and Tommy and I sharing the biggest laugh because it was predicted by everything we did in the first three or four records in my career.

The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.

People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.

Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.” – Socrates (470-399 B.C.) “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t

He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.

Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky.

Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!

After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.