B. B. King

Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.

I look at an audience kind of like meeting my in-laws for the first time. You want to be yourself, but you still want to be somebody that they like. When I go onstage each night, I try my best to outguess my audience, and I like to feel in most cases like I’m a big guy with long rubber arms that I can reach around my audience and swing and sway with them – move them with me. And many nights, I can’t. Many nights I can. But you do like a good manager with a baseball team. You keep pulling pitchers, you keep trying.

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

When I heard T-Bone, I flat out lost my mind.

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.

If there was no ladies, I wouldn’t wanna be on the planet. Ladies, friends, and music – without those three, I wouldn’t wanna be here.

My mother was a very beautiful lady, I thought. She was very good to me. I guess – she died when I was nine and a half, but if she had lived, I probably wouldn’t be trying to play guitar. She wanted me to be known, but as something else. Not a guitar player.

I was bribing North to wear her butter 350’s by saying they glow in the dark. However, she made me turn off the lights to test it. She caught me lying but Kanye was on speaker phone and said don’t worry I will make them.

Maybe that’s all that family really is, a group of people who all miss the same imaginary place.

My daughter hasn’t seen me with anybody in five years. I’m very, very selective when it comes to that because I want to make sure that it’s real. I don’t want her to see me with just anybody because she means everything to me.

[On his mother’s adversity] She had a very difficult beginning… All of my mothers family were killed… and she came to America at the time of the depression. It was not an easy life at all.

The best thing about having a sister was that I always had a friend.

Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavors to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each other to their children.

My most important title is “mom-in-chief”. My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the centre of my world.

I believed in raising my children as I had been raised.

The times when Barack and I are at our most relaxed are when we invite some friends over who we have known forever. And you put a little music on top of that? Some good food? It renews your spirit to get back in the game.

Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.

The joy is still there when I see Sean. He didn’t come out of my belly, but my God, I’ve made his bones, because I’ve attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I’m so proud of all his things. But he is my biggest pride.

My dad died, I think, at 87. So I’ll be lucky if I make 87. But in a lot of cases, the younger people live longer than their parents. And they know more. My dad used to tell me he ate the hog from his rooter to his tooter. So do I when I’m not trying to lose weight.

Between a man and his wife nothing ought to rule but love. Authority is for children and servants, yet not without sweetness.

I owe much to mother. She had an expert’s understanding, but also approached art emotionally.