B. B. King

I don’t care for the music when they’re talking bad about women because I think women are God’s greatest gift to the planet – I just like music.

I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good – he’s rock’s #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us.

As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion. Blues were about feelings. They seem to bring out the feelings of the artist and they brought out my feelings as a kid. They made me wanna move, or sing, or pick up Reverend’s guitar and figure out how to make those wonderful sounds.

Nobody loves me but my mother – And she could be jivin’, too.

Cotton was a force of nature. There’s a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.

I don’t like to feel that I owe anything. I like to feel that I pay my own way – there’s no free lunch. And when people give me all these great compliments, I thank them but still go back to my room and practice. And a lot of times I say to myself ‘I wish I could be worthy of all the compliments that people give me sometime.’ I am not inventing anything that’s going to stop cancer or muscular distrophy or anything, but I like to feel that my time and talent is always there for the people that need it.

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

If you don’t know what it is you want – and I mean specifically – then you won’t even know when you have it.

You know, it sounds like I’m bragging in some way, but as far as career stuff, there’s not that much stuff that scares me. I know what I can do well.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

Sometimes I think someone upstairs saved me from being ordinary.

Ageing’s alright, better than the alternative, which is not being here.

I want to be a hero, a small and good kind of hero, even though I know heroes have very short lives.

You don’t get anything clean without getting something else dirty.

I haven’t put a pencil to a piece of paper, working out a problem, in years; I do it in my head.

The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.

If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.

I can visualize the time when almost every family will have a small plane in their back yard.

The love we were promised in fairy tales was never something for us to find. It has always been something for us to create.