B. B. King

I don’t think it’s meant for man to know everything at once.

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it.

I don’t feel that no big stone should be put over my head, saying he did this, he did that. Unless there’s something that I really did do. I believe I’m just ordinary. And I’d like for people to think of me that way, as just a guy that tried. Wanted to be loved by other people because he loved people.

You never miss what you’ve never had. I never had any other life. I didn’t know any other life.

People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

Finally Beiderbecke took out a silver cornet. He put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying ‘yes.’

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

What I learned the most from Prince was putting art first, being creatively ambitious, and putting creativity at the forefront of what I do.

I don’t think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.

If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.

Find the best teachers, listen to the finest playing and try to emulate that. Be true to the music.

I don’t like recording studios – except my own, which is just a little room above the garage.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired and that’s all there is to it.

You want the audience to feel what you’re doing.