“A contract is an ask game, and if it asks for an hour, and I submit to an hour, then it’s an hour. When I look at a contract, I look at the obligation – where, when, how long, the compensation. If I agree to it, that’s the way it is. I have an obligation. They have an obligation.”

If the people in the audience are talking, you’re being ignored. If the people are gazing at you, you’ve got something they want to hear.

Rock is my child and my grandfather.

You don’t just go to the studio and say, ‘I’m going to write a hit.’ It becomes a hit when people like your compositions.

Rock ‘n’ roll accepted me and paid me, even though I loved the big bands I went that way because I wanted a home of my own. I had a family. I had to raise them. Let’s don’t leave out the economics. No way.

Maybellene, why can’t you be true?

The Big Band Era is my era. People say, ‘Where did you get your style from?’ I did the Big Band Era on guitar. That’s the best way I could explain it.

Looking hard for a drive in, searching for a corner cafe, where the hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day.

Music is an important part of our culture and record stores play a vital part in keeping the power of music alive.

All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.

I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn’t paint.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

Everything I wrote about wasn’t about me, but about the people listening.

I think I see her, please let me off this bus. Nadine, honey, is that you?

Up come a flat top, he was movin’ up with me.

It used to be called boogie-woogie, it used to be called blues, used to be called rhythm and blues…It’s called rock now.

He could play the guitar just like ringing a bell.

The next time you are encouraged to fall into line, to be a sport and everything in you says no – be courageous and go your own way. There is no compensation in conformity.

History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.

Beer is a gift from the goddesses, a soothing balm given our species to bring joy and comfort in compensation for the curse of self-awareness.

We won’t know them by their name but their compensation will be to affect the outcome of the planet.

With thorns in the inner world there will always be roses in the outer world, in law-able compensation.

We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.

It is some compensation for great evils, that they enforce great lessons.

A lot of people say I seem masculine, but I don’t feel it. I feel intrinsically feminine. I’d love to be one of the boys but I always felt a bit on the outside. Maybe my masculine qualities come from overcompensating because I’m not one of the boys.