“The consequences, [screw] the implications of the actions, to hell with it all… whatever happens as a result is better than the nothingness that is inevitable with silence.”

They asked me, How did you learn to sing the blues like that? How did you learn to sing that heavy? I just opened my mouth and that’s what I sounded like.

I’m tired of all these hippie jack-offs

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

There is no act, however trivial, but has its train of consequences.

Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Every fairy child may keep Two strong ponies and ten sheep; All have houses, each his own, Built of brick or granite stone; They live on cherries, they run wild I’d love to be a Fairy’s child.

Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.

Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war.

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.