I keep living life as it's dealt to me. Sometimes, it's not dealt 100 percent. Sometimes it's dealt on the low '30s.

I will play my part by singing the spirit into every open heart.

I started with Sam Cooke when I was 6 or 7 years old.

People shout out for songs and I don't even remember writing them.

Leave them wanting more and you know they'll call you back.

It is my fondest wish that the gift of song that God has given me will flow from my soul to yours and help ease any burden that might weigh upon you.

I keep living life as it's dealt to me. Sometimes, it's not dealt 100 percent. Sometimes it's dealt on the low '30s.

Nobody could understand why a guy would love his guitar, then all of a sudden turn around and try to destroy it. Jimi was just different.

You gotta know when it's time to hang up. But when I finally go, let me go out on stage, my perfect ending. Don't let me go when I'm sick or asleep. Let me be in motion.

Chicago is old stomping grounds for me.

Estee Lauder cologne. Sam Cooke always wore it, and I started wearing it because he wore it.

I know a lot of people who are not here anymore, and I wonder why I'm still here... Not a day goes by that I don't think about Sam Cooke. His presence is so strong and so convincing to me, a true artist, a true talent, who never talked down to people.

I like to swim, I like to play with my dogs and I love to eat - but I have to start watching that because my suits are getting too small.

I met a zillion people through Ronnie Wood. He's been my friend since he was in The Faces, and he's still my best friend. A real person, earthy, working 24 hours a day, uplifting to be around, and he's still got that fire about music.

I never gave up on music, and I feel like music never gave up on me.

I think people like it when I tell them, 'I'm lucky to be here, because they are, too. Ain't nothing to do with age. There ain't nothing promised to you. Everybody's going to die.

I was hoping I could become a success to give my mother and my father a better way of living.

I was on stage with Cyndi Lauper, and my trousers split. It seemed like she was going to sing for ever.

Once upon a time, I could sing three hours. Now, when you see me say 'I'm done,' I'm done; ain't nothing left till the next night.

People think you have to go through a lot of changes to become a soul singer, You just have to go through life.

Plantation gospel music was the stuff I fell in love with when I was a kid - these beautiful melodies and these hard, hard stories.

We take things for granted, and because we wake up every day, you start talking about what you're going to do next week. I said, 'Who told you you would be here next week?'

When I first played New York, it was with James Brown at the Apollo, and I was playing in a band under the name The Valentinos. I remember Sam Cooke saying, 'I want you to go in there with James Brown. I couldn't be as hard on you as James Brown would be.' But we came out marching like soldiers.

When I want to check out how my life's been, I go through my albums. They steps in my life.

When I was a kid, during those days, you couldn't use instruments. It was against the pastor's religion, so all the singers would make these instruments with their voices. It was just unbelievable. I couldn't explain it.

You knew the difference between Barbra Streisand and Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, straight away. Now everyone sounds like each other, and I don't think that's right.

You learn if you mind stay open. And once you can't learn no more, your mind must be closed. Life goes on and you keep growing, you know?

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

Yes, I am Algerian of Moroccan origin through my parents, but all my life is Algeria. I was born there.

At one point in your life, you'll have the thing you want or the reasons why you don't.