Respect your own creativity and respect the creativity and creative space of other people.

I'd advise you to visit New Orleans before you pass away. I really would. Because if you die without seeing New Orleans, you wasted half your life.

Lots of the bands [in New Orleans] couldn't read too much music. So they used a fiddle to play the lead - a fiddle player could read - and that was to give them some protection.

The New Orleans bands, you see, didn't play with a flat sound. They'd shade the music. After the band had played with the two or three horns blowing, they'd let the rhythm have it.

Everything in New Orleans was competitive. People would always be betting on who was the best and the greatest in everything. That's where the battles of music came in.

Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.

Content is King. Promotion is Queen

Fools who don't respect the past are doomed to repeat it.

We still have to put some cherry syrup on it, and then we can eat it

Wherever it may be, whoever may hold it. That's who I am.

This imperiousness which aids us in all things is merely a fitting authority which comes from superior spirit.

I continue to be very shy. I think a lot of actors and performers are really weird, shy people working it out onstage. I don't know why that is.

the look of the sky as the day's blue blood runs out of its cheek.

In previous armies, soldiers used their time to clean their weapons and stock up on ammunition. Our weapons are words, and we may need our arsenal at any moment.