I can't explain why one wants to pass a particular sort of pain onto other people, but you do.

Every musical movement that is big enough has to produce some good musicians who wouldn't have had the incentive to start playing without it.

In those days, between the ages of 12 and 18 you meant nothing. You were the extra place at the side table if someone came to dinner. You were of no interest to anyone.

I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.

If the same phrase in the same place created the right effect, I was perfectly prepared to use it every time. I wasn't worried that I wasn't improvising.

I'm a compulsive musician, but it's also a bloody good way out of having to do anything else.

In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can't say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.

When I reflect on how things have changed, I can't help but laugh.

The British feel of blues has been hard, rather than emotional. Far too much emphasis on 12 bar, too little attention to words, far too little originality.

I must have been heavily schizophrenic all my life. The me who hears what the other me can't play is the dominant one.

Since the age of 12, all my musical thinking has been influenced by Afro-American music.

I can't explain why one wants to pass a particular sort of pain onto other people, but you do.

I had always intended to make a living out of playing blues. But I never admitted it to myself. I don't suppose I could have given a logical reason for it ever becoming possible to do so.

Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.

The parallel development in American blues to the British movement has resulted in Johnny Winters.

Once you became associated with a children's show, you're finished.

I wanted to be able to play guitar. I wanted to be able to make music hurt.

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

The British feel of blues has been hard rather than emotional. Far too much emphasis on 12 bar too little attention to words far too little originality.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn't cause me any serious pain by staying inside.

I meditate a lot, but I am constantly in pain. I'm trying to live with this. You just have to accept it.

We may not commit a lesser Sin under pretence to avoid a greater, but we may, nay we ought to endure the greatest Pain and Grief rather than commit the least Sin.

The worst pain a man can suffer: to have insight into much and power over nothing.

From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.

Imitation is the sincerest form of pain.

The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.

Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

When the Negro cries with pain from his deep hurt and lays his petition for elemental justice before the nation, he is calling upon the American people to kindle about that crucible of race relationships the fires of American faith.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

My focus is to forget the pain of life. Forget the pain, mock the pain, reduce it. And laugh.

This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs.

One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life. That word is love.

Whether they run a record company or a grocery store, every boss will tell you you're in big trouble if you're borrowing more than you can ever afford to pay back. Delaying the pain for future generations is suicidal. We've got to start getting the deficit down right now, not next year.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Hush! Check those words. Do not cure ill with ill and make your pain still heavier than it is.

Pain is such an important thing in life. I think that as an artist you have to experience suffering.

This is a tough game. There are times when you've got to play hurt, when you've got to block out the pain.

I fell in love with Neil's pain. We were in this cocoon of intensity. Neil and I were uniquely in the same position at the same time, having overwhelming success facing us.

But all lost things are in the angels' keeping, Love; No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love; The years of Heaven with all earth's little pain Make Good Together there we can begin again, In babyhood.

You're lucky I took me a vow of non-violence, or you'd be suffering some pain right now.

Unborn children do not have a voice, but they are young members of the human family. It is time to look at the unborn child, and recognize that it is really a young human, who can feel pain and should be treated with care.

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

I don't think any drug that can cause brain damage, failing kidneys, hardening arteries, pain, and suffering should be made available.