Annie Lennox

When you’re successful, things have a momentum and you can’t tell if you have created the momentum or it’s creating you.

I think Ive done the best I could have done. But I keep wanting to play better, go further. There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I havent yet done. When I was younger I thought maybe Id reached that peak. But Im 86 now, and if I make it through to next month, Ill be 87. And now I know it can never be perfect, it can never be exactly what it should be, so you got to keep going further, getting better.

I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.

We didn’t have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free

Ahhh – those Jazz guys are just makin’ that stuff up!

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

Music is like wine, the less you know about it the sweeter you like it. 

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.

You only go around once and this ain’t no rehearsal.

I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.

One of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

I’m gonna live till I die.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues,’ they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

I think I was supposed to play Jazz.