Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

You know why we're stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don't let themselves feel things.

Guess what, I might be the first hippie pinup girl.

I won't quit to become someone's old lady.

If I hold back, I'm no good. I'm no good. I'd rather be good sometimes, than holding back all the time.

I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.

My father wouldn't get us a TV, he wouldn't allow a TV in the house.

I'm one of those regular weird people.

You got to get it while you can.

Texas is OK if you want to settle down and do your own thing quietly, but it's not for outrageous people, and I was always outrageous.

When I sing, I feel like when you're first in love. It's more than sex. It's that point two people can get to they call love, when you really touch someone for the first time, but it's gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills.

On stage I make love to twenty five thousand people; and then I go home alone.

Rock on out.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.

I got treated very badly in Texas. They don't treat beatniks too good in Texas. Port Arthur people thought I was a beatnik, though they'd never seen one and neither had I.

On stage, I make love to 25,000 different people, then I go home alone.

Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.

All of a sudden, someone threw me in front of this rock and roll band. And I decided then and there that was it. I never wanted to do anything else.

As it gets closer and more probable, being a star is really losing its meaning.

Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin. Now, they are so subtle, they can milk you with two notes. They can make you feel like they told you the whole universe. But I don't know that yet. All I got now is strength. Maybe if I keep singing, maybe I'll get it.

I can't talk about my singing. I'm inside it. How can you describe something you're inside of?

I have to have the 'umph.' I've got to feel it, because if it's not getting through to me, the audience sure as hell aren't going to feel it either.

I'm a victim of my own insides. There was a time when I wanted to know everything. It used to make me very unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn't know what to do with it. But now I've learned to make that feeling work for me.

I've been looking around, and I noticed something: how much you really need to be loved. Ambition isn't just a desperate quest for positions or money. It's just love - lots of love.

Playing is just about feeling. Playing isn't necessarily about misery. Playing isn't necessarily about happiness. But it's just about letting yourself feel all those things that you have already on the inside of you, but you're all the time trying to push them aside because they don't make for polite conversation or something.

Dont compromise yourself. You are all youve got.

Dont compromise your self youre all you got.

The older the grapes sweeter the wine.

My business is to enjoy and have fun. And why not if in the end everything will end right

Don't compromise yourself. You're all you've got.

I just like to stay busy, and I like to work with interesting people.

Eating people is wrong.

Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

For most of us, relationship with another is based on dependence, either economic or psychological. This dependence creates fear, breeds in us possessiveness, results in friction, suspicion, frustration.

Changes like the telephone and telegraphy, which tend to reduce the cost of organizing spatially, will tend to increase the size of the firm.

To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

You can't predict it all. People will tell you to plan things out as best you can. They will tell you to focus. They will tell you to follow your dreams. They will all be right.

If people are being upstanding citizens of the Republic, then you have to widen the net to incarcerate them. This explains why America's prisons are full of nonviolent offenders - a perfect example of American exceptionalism.

I say that Pakistanis should not consider girls as weaklings.

Before prognostication, a disclaimer: I have never been able to pick a winner. Not that it has ever stopped me from trying to. Well, it has stopped me from buying stock, but let's not talk about that.

You can win more arguments then you might think as a writer, even though you legally have no recourse, and your script can get muddied and altered in any way possible. You can use reason, logic, and passion to argue persuasively for a case in your favor.

Let us be more simple and less vain.

One of the rules I try to follow is that normal people are going to be involved even in heroic events.

If you hold back your feelings because you are afraid of getting hurt you end up hurting anyway.

The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.

In order to have an enemy, one must be somebody. One must be a force before he can be resisted by another force. A malicious enemy is better than a clumsy friend.

I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf. If I don't like the book after a bit, I don't finish it. But I like to be surprised.