B. B. King

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.

I don’t try to just be a blues singer – I try to be an entertainer. That has kept me going.

Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.

T-Bone was, to me, that sound of being in heaven.

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

I remember Elvis as a young man hanging around the Sun Studios. Even then, I knew this kid had a tremendous talent. He was a dynamic young boy. His phraseology, his way of looking at a song, was as unique as Sinatra’s. I was a tremendous fan, and had Elvis lived, there would have been no end to his inventiveness.

Warm summer sun, shine kindly here. Warm southern wind, blow softly here. Green sod above, lie light, lie light. Good night, dear Heart, Good night, good night.

First we make our habits, then our habits make us.

You are the fever that never broke, the name stuck in my throat. You are every letter of every word in every poem I ever wrote.

When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?

If you really understand Zen, you can use any book, even the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.

Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

Enjoy what other people do and learn from them.

They ask me how I love you and I say in pages, in novels, in volumes. I love you like my favorite story, the one that I wake up to every day and watch unfold. And I don’t know how it ends, but I know your name is already written in the chapters of my life that I have yet to live.

There’s no limit to the things you can do.

Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys. Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at Grandma’s house. And a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both. He was still the guy who’d picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger-side door.

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.

She wears her beauty as the sky wears the stars, infinitely deep and forever shining.

Opinions are like asses, every body’s got one!