B. B. King

I’ve known people that was a part of a family and always feel that the family liked everyone else but them. That hurts, and that’s as deep a hurt as you can possibly get. I’ve known people that would have problems with their love life. This is kind of how blues began – out of feeling misused, mistreated. Feeling like they had nobody to turn to. Blues don’t necessarily have to be sung by a person that came from Mississippi as I did, because there are people having problems all over the world.

When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, ‘That’s just that ole blues singer.’

Ignorance is bliss? That’s bull, far as I’m concerned. Because I was making a half a cent a side – one penny for a record. It’s like building buses, for example. If you built this bus for me and I didn’t know anything about it, you could charge me whatever I’d pay for it. Now, which one of us is crazy? Me. And that’s the way they did me on the records. But I don’t fault them for it, because if you don’t know, you don’t know. It took me to learn.

The problem is that a lot of the blues stations are late on Saturday night, and like a lot of people, I ain’t no vampire!

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public’s going to like, anyway.

A lot of people believe what other people say.

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache!

There is no remedy for love than to love more.

But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.

O ’tis love, ’tis love, ’tis love that makes the world go round!

Love – THE FEELING – is a fruit of love, the verb.

When you plant a seed of love, it is you that blossoms.

I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

I want to be loved while I’m here, and the only way to get love is to give love.

Real love is freedom, and this is what you’ve been given by the Creator – the freedom to love and to choose your own path.

He’s out his head, I’m out my mind. We got that love, the crazy kind.

My father, soft as rainclouds, my mother, hard as hail, prepared me to take the world by storm.

Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love.

I can’t help this awful energy. God damn right, you should be scared of me.