Ray Charles

I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been able to hear.

What is a soul? It’s like electricity – we don’t really know what it is, but it’s a force that can light a room.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

Music is my life, professionally, for nearly 60 years. To be recognized by the academy is still the highest honor.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

Music’s been around a long time, and there’s going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it’s a big record, that’s the frosting on the cake, but music’s the main meal.

Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn’t, I don’t really see a point to it.

Let the music speak for itself.

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired and that’s all there is to it.

You can’t sing about love unless you know about it.

You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet. If you feel like clapping your hands, clap your hands. And if you feel like taking off your shoes, take off your shoes. We are here to have a ball. So we want you to leave your worldly troubles outside and come in here and swing.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.

True Jazz lovers understand the rhythms are infectious because they are the roots.

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

From hard rhythms of Be-bop, the mellow harmonies of Cool, to atonal forays of Free and the Straight Ahead delivery of Modern, it’s all Jazz.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

It’s not what you do, but the way you’re doing it and in the end that’s all that we have.