I started out playing ukulele when I was 5 or 6 years old.

We started out when I was 6 years old. We played ukuleles and sang Everly Brothers songs.

I can't imagine anything more worthwhile than doing what I most love. And they pay me for it.

Music is very spiritual, it has the power to bring people together.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

I used to go to these old tent revivals and listen to the gospel singers. If you think rock and roll is energetic, it pales in comparison to a Pentecostal tent revival.

So yeah, I am definitely a blues man at heart.

I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.

I love music more just in and of itself. I love harmony and rhythm.

I've always had a great love of music since childhood. It changes every day.. every time you write, it's a new experience. It's a self expression.

The most profound, tangible influence in my life has been my wife, Monique. I don't know that I would even be alive were it not for her, and I certainly would not be the person that I am today.

We want your skull! Make no bones about it!

Competition exists to choose who gets the prize when the prize can’t be shared.

The Government goes after the little guys, not their own.

It's a great experience. If you get a chance to run for president, do it.

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

[Our self-image is] that gap between intention and effect

I used to draw a lot. If my mother would ask me to do something else, I'd have a hairy conniption. I'd just go crazy.

I'm afraid of plenty of things," he said. "I just do them anyway.

I have been treated as a freak, rather like the fat lady at the circus.

With that strange knowing that comes over me, like a clairvoyance, I know that I am sure of myself and my enormous and alarmingly timeless love for you; which will always be.