“Why should I hold back now and sound mediocre, just so I can sound mediocre twenty years from now?”

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!

You’re only as much as you settle for. If they settle for being somebody’s dishwasher that’s their own f***ing problem.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

I read, I painted, I didn’t hate niggers.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers. You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely.

If you have a great band with a mediocre drummer, you have a mediocre band. If you have a mediocre band with a great drummer, you have a great band!

With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.

That said, there’s a lot of bad telly, but there’s also a lot of very high quality that is something I’d be much more proud of than a mediocre film.

Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.

I’m just gonna tell her, “Be a staff writer for a sitcom. Because they’ll have to hire you, they can’t really fire you, and you don’t have to produce that much. It’ll be awesome.”

Women right now, we can’t make mediocre [stuff]. Men can and do make tons of mediocre stuff, but I feel like women.

I’ve never met anyone who has said, “My goal is to make America mediocre.” That’s a kind of hard-right conservative fallacy.

Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.