“I have stage fright every single concert I’ve ever done. I have at least four or five minutes of it. It’s absolute living hell.”

Any article’s good. Long as it’s publicity, I think that’s all that matters. I think it’s advancement for my career.

I play piano all the time. I’m always at my piano, playing music.

So it’s 1976 and we’re still riding on our past success. I mean I’ve gone on like that for I don’t know how long.

I sit and I write automatically. I don’t really try to write. My subconscious mind takes over and writes the songs for me. Songs come very easily for me. When I’m inspired, it takes me 20 minutes to write a song.

I think about God, yes, and I wonder if there is a God. And if there is a God, will God please help me through my hard trips.

The idea of taking a song, envisioning the overall sound in my head and then bringing the arrangement to life in the studio…well, that gives me satisfaction like nothing else.

I have an instinct for music, or a feeling about it, and I’ll have my feelings guide my hands.

I’ve never written one note or word of music simply because I think it will make money.

I think cursing is a bunch of malarkey.

I believe that music is God’s voice.

Every now and then I hear voices in my head, but not very clear. I can’t understand what they are saying. It’s a mental illness. I have been diagnosed as a manic depressive.

If there’s not love present, it’s much, much harder to function. When there’s love present, it’s easier to deal with life.

J.S. Bach was easily the greatest musical innovator in the history of the world. He was so advanced for his time. There’s a spiritual depth to his music. You can listen to it and it’s like meditation.

The only reason I’d ever get a sex change operation is to see what it’s like to be right all the time.

There’s nothing greater than a girl…. Well a kid, your daughter, but that’s a girl too.

Humor – it helps to make the vibe better – it loosens up the vibrations.

When people go to concerts, they say I’m going to see… not, I’m going to hear.

I was not influenced by concerts as a child, but I was very strongly influenced by the ballets I saw.

You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.

I’m going for the concert, but I’m really going for the corn.

I just… want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.

“I’m fine. I just…I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about…I just…want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.

I don’t like [to] make a woman … an abstract concept of the fashion. I don’t like [to] say, “You must wear that.” … I am not a dictator.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.