One minute we can be in a small club, the next minute we can be in a coliseum, and the next minute we can be in a small auditorium. It varies, depending on the promoter, the budget, and the travelling distance.

One minute we can be in a small club, the next minute we can be in a coliseum, and the next minute we can be in a small auditorium. It varies, depending on the promoter, the budget, and the travelling distance.

The movie is actually from a book by Stephen King called The Body. When they were gonna put it to a motion picture, they found the story was a bit too strong for the title The Body, based on a young kid's movie. It would be too heavy.

The industry now wants to be in charge of everything.

It doesn't take me long to write songs.

Of course, the kids who had never heard of a person called Ben E. King were then aware of the name associated with the song. That gave a tremendous lift to me as an artist.

Those things don't happen today. I feel sorry for the kids in the industry today. They have on sunglasses, eat caviar in jet planes, but they'll never know the true feeling that we did.

When we took on the name The Drifters, we became the new Drifters, and signed a contract to be put on salary, which I think was like a hundred dollars a week, a piece, five hundred dollars for all five of us.

It would probably take me an hour to two to write it down, get the feel of it, and that's with quite a few changes. It's not really a hard thing for me to do.

I never even visualized for a second doing what I'm doing.

Yeah. I'm amateurish. I can play enough to write a song, or strum on a little guitar to write out a song. But, I don't play well at all. I wouldn't even attempt for a second to play in public.

And, because there was an honesty about all that was going on. It connected with the people in the street.

One of the members of the group, I can't remember which one, found out we were making $3 - $5,000 a night. We were getting a hundred dollars a week a piece. Everybody got upset about it.

The Phil Spector that I would meet has always been a nice, quiet, little guy who's very serious about his work; obviously you can tell that because each and everything he's ever done has always been charted.

Yeah. I've been pretty fortunate to travel I guess, all around the place.

At that time, we were in charge. We didn't ask. We just did. We just did what was in our heart.

I still think my whole career was accidental. I didn't pursue it. I feel like I'm cheating sometimes.

I do a lot of Vegas work and work with the comedians.

It never dawned on me at any particular time of my life that people are paid tremendous money to sing.

When I got involved with The Five Crowns who later became The Drifters, and we got this hit record, I still was looking at this as kind of a fun thing.

We were doing things with a hundred per cent feeling. It wasn't programmed. It wasn't asked for. It wasn't structured. It was just there. It was very raw. I don't think the industry would allow that to happen again.

He was a manager, one of the singers, I guess talent coordinator for the local talent in Harlem. His name was Lover Patterson. He was living right across the street from where my dad had his restaurant. I guess he saw a lot of kids come in, a lot of my buddies.

You were able to sing something they related to instantly, because it was part of what you felt. It was part of what you had already traveled through. It's part of the people you were associating with daily. It was all of that.

If there's anything about the business that I love and that I'm extremely happy about, is that my career started at that time and that I met some of the greatest entertainers at that time and some are still here.

Many times I've gone on tours with Paul Anka. He would have someone sitting behind him to keep people from even talking to him. You were almost in a little restricted area there.

I do like what Alicia Keys and John Legend are doing. With their music, you keep your clothes on.

In my vocal, I think you can hear something of my earlier times when I'd sing in subway halls for the echo and perform doo-wop on street corners. But I had a lot of influences, too - singers like Sam Cooke, Brook Benton and Roy Hamilton.

I won't be afraid just as long as you stand, stand by me.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

I always make the joke that I go home, to one of my homes, to go and do laundry so I can go on the road again.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

It is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated it is finished when it surrenders.

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

I've always wanted to be a footballer, and I've always believed that's the path I was going to go down.

Specifically, the U.S. holds strength. Its own context makes it a very competitive country, but I believe that if we recognize how interdependent the U.S. with its neighbors from the North and the South, we are part of NAFTA, a trade agreement.

My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there.

The biggest thing that concerns me is when we start getting countries using cybercrime to shut down infrastructure, electricity, communications systems, the Internet, et cetera.

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration to live on the momentum of the past to be thrown back upon routine sensuality and the narrow self.

The reality is that art has often risen to greater heights than the people who created it. Many flawed artists have created great works of art. You have to decide if you are going to listen to Richard Wagner's music or not because he was very anti-Semitic.

We must be free not because we claim freedom but because we practice it.

I feel like a nuclear missile. Point me in that direction, I'll go.

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.

I don't know, I feel like as time has gone on, hip-hop has become really redundant and repetitive.

Television was supposed to be a national park. Instead it has become a money machine. It's a commodity now, just like pork bellies.

Strength of 100 men? I'd probably just get mad and hurt somebody and end up in jail. I think invisibility would probably be the best thing. I could be like, 'You know what, let me just see what these folks are talking about over here.' Then you could sneak into Rams cheerleaders' locker room.

Sometimes it is better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing.

We need not only an executive to make international law, but we need the military forces to enforce that law and the judicial system to bring the criminals to justice before they have the opportunity to build military forces that use these horrid weapons that rogue nations and movements can get hold of - germs and atomic weapons.

Wednesday a junior came to me, and told me I was to be hazed as I left the Opera House Friday night.

I want to be an integrated woman.