“Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.”

On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I go home alone.

All any girl really wants is just love and a man. But what man can put up with a rock-n-roll star?

People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.

At least we know we tend to be afraid. If you object to my plural noun, I’ll retract it.

When everything is together – the band, me, the audience, it’s boss! It’s just like magic.

If you don’t settle for that and you keep fighting it, you know, you’ll end up anything you want to be.

I gotta go on doin’ it the way I see it…I got no choice but to take it like I see it. I’m here to have a party while I’m on this earth..

You are what you settle for.

I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.

I talk to the audience, look into their eyes. I need them and they need me.

You are what you settle for. You are only as much as you settle for.

It used to make me unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn’t know what to do with it. But now I’ve learned how to make feeling work for me…

What we’ve had to do is learn to control success, put it in perspective, and not lose the essence of what we’re doing – the music.

I started singing rhythmically, and now I’m learning from Otis Redding to push a song instead of just sliding over it

Freedom is just another word for when you have NOTHING left to lose.

I think I think too much. That’s why I drink!

How can you get bored if the audience is cheering and laughing at something you’re doing?

Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.

Or try out what I learned and see how it worked with an audience, because where are you gonna get an audience?

So that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It’s an extraordinary thing. It’s wild turf up there.

[Salomaybe] is my presentation, my vision of the world. Not so much to satisfy the audience at large.

I did it in Looking for Richard, too. And I figure, if I can weave it into the actual play and get the audience interested, like the robes going up and down, they’ll pay attention long enough to consume it.

Is it possible to do something that that makes an audience uncomfortable, challenges them, makes them see things they’re not used to?

Obviously given good health, and a continuing audience and a record company that allows me to do music.