I don't play a lot of fancy guitar. I don't want to play it. The kind of guitar I want to play is mean, mean licks.

The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.

When I die, they'll bury the blues with me. But the blues will never die.

I don't do nothin’ I don't want to do.

I don't think about time. You're here when you're here. I think about today, staying in tune.

The one thing the blues don't get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people's throat so they got no choice but to listen to it.

No matter what you got, the blues is there

It's never hard to sing the blues. Everyone in the world has the blues . . .

I remember back in Detroit, I used to go to the Apex Bar every night after I got off work. The bartender there used to call me Boom Boom. I don't know why, but he did.

I hitchhiked, took trucks 'n' trains - anything that would pick me up. I stopped in Memphis for about six months and they found me and come got me. Stayed about a month an' split again.

Poor people have the blues because they're poor and hungry. Rich people can't sleep at night because they're trying to hold on to their money and everything they have.

In the end, it's not what we keep our children from that will save them. It's what we put into them in the first place.

Men are more like the time they live in than they are like their fathers.

An award does not change the quality of a book.

On a regular basis I go over in my mind some of the most troublesome things I see about how people approach eating, and the wonder mess we have made out of a very simple thing.

I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.

I am a man of very many anxieties but doing strange things with the camera is not one of them.

Nobody is ever too old to dream. And dreams never grow old.

It is the faith and perseverance and single-mindedness with which Hitler has perfected his weapons of destruction that commands my admiration.

I hate the idea that you have to give up anything. I think you can be powerful and still be provocative, you can be smart and have a softness, you can have all of it.

You can't ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.