If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough.

The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn...What comes out is what I feel.

Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way.

I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.

People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.

As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.

I have to make small adjustments, but I can't change too much. If I'm worrying about that stuff too much then the show isn't as funny.

You've got to bend with the wind or you're broken.

It's good to be here. At 98, it's good to be anywhere.

I'm too judgmental of other people putting themselves out there in any way, I guess.

The thing that cracks me up is how these reality characters start out thrilled and excited just to be on television, and how they move to thinking they are as big as the Friends.

Going to college was never an option. I was passionate about music, but how much talent I actually had was another matter.

We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes.

Make haste to live, and consider each day a life.

You simply cannot hang a millionaire in America.