B. B. King

Playing the guitar is like telling the truth – you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.

Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon. I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

I’d take my guitar and play on the streets. A gospel song would get me a pat on the head. But a blues would get me a dime. So you see why I stuck with the blues.

When you don’t have much money, you worry that they’ll just put you in the ground someplace and your loved ones won’t know where you are.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.

I love the ’80s. I’m obsessed with it. I love the hair and the people.

That had her lip-syncing to a record… There was no protection for her as a person or as an artist…

Twitter seems like a busman’s holiday: just more writing. I have no plans to do it. I’ll just stick with my 24/7 webcam. I’m old-fashioned that way.

I’m from the ghetto side of Sydney. We don’t really do drive-bys, we just do drive-thrus.

I’m just glad to be feeling better. I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.

I had to get back to work. NBC has me under contract. The baby and I only have a verbal agreement.

Making a movie requires 20 to 500 people to make and a lot of money and the stakes are a lot higher.

In Los Angeles, they don’t want you to fail, they want you to die.

For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness.

You can sometimes get your own feelings across more strongly if you pretend that you’re singing it from someone else’s angle. But it’s always from me. It’s just a new way of framing it.

If people don’t like me for whatever I do, for being me, then that’s too bad. I don’t want to change to be something that I’m not for other people to like me.

I couldn’t live without my music, man. Or me mum.

One failed attempt at a shoe bomb and we all take off our shoes at the airport. Thirty-one school shootings since Columbine and no change in our regulation of guns.

All you could do was to see them. We were backstage when the Beatles were on and you could just about hear a noise. It was just literally screaming.