“You’ve got to make haste while it’s still light of day. My godmother used to say, I don’t want to rust out, I just want to work out. If you stand still long enough, people will throw dirt on you.”

Everyone I’ve worked with has been good. You learn from the good, what’s good, and you learn from the bad what not to do.

People talk about love and it seems like a cliche but it’s a real thing – the more love we spread around the world the more it’s going to change lives.

At the end of the day, give up your worries and give thanks for the journey.

Live stage is being made as you go along. You feel the energy. There’s nothing like a live audience.

I go to my grandchildren. They keep their grandpa informed on what’s going on.

Sometimes we look for those thunderous things to happen in our life for our lives to change or go in the other direction. We seek the miracle. We seek the parting of the seas, the moving of the mountains. But no, its a quiet thing. At least for me it was.

The stage sharpened my creative instrument and encouraged me to go deeper and try new things.

If we plant the right seeds, tomorrow will be better. If you put out good things, then you’ll get good things back. That’s part of our responsibility as entertainers.

I didn’t know who Langston Hughes was till he met me backstage.

Nine years after I had my own accident, I find that in trying to go back to doing those things that I used to do just doesn’t fit. Everything seems to just fall apart. I don’t know why but I think it is because I am this new creature.

Our creator says, ‘Here’s your birth and here’s your death’ – and the rest are the things you learn on your journey. This was my experience – and the choice is, I can lay in the misery, or choose to learn from it and move on.

The death of my daughter is a subject I talk about briefly because there is nothing more tragic.

So be encouraged and dedicate yourself to your dream and if your dream should come my way one day then we will dance upon the boards of life.

When people come and see my show, I try to infuse into them that they can walk away feeling like their lives are a victory.

I used to dance, but now I only move.

You’ve got to make haste while it’s still light of day.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

Time always seems long to the child who is waiting – for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day.

A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.

It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not.

Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.

As long as I’m still able to have a hit on the radio and sell a few albums and some tickets,

People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

Hey, I think it’s easy for guys to hit .300 and stay in the big leagues. Hit .200 and try to stick around as long as I did; I think it’s a much greater accomplishment. That’s hard.