I don't play a lot of fancy guitar. I don't want to play it. The kind of guitar I want to play is mean, mean licks.

The way Will Moore taught me, and the way I play it, the blues is just something different.

I do benefits. I do them all the time. There's so many people out there that needs help that I can't say I won't help them.

Since you knew they was goin' to cheat you anyway, I recorded under any name with all of 'em.

You can go to Europe, and there's no turnin' back - any parts of Europe. Wherever you are, there is no stop and go for the blues. The blues go but it don't stop.

In my career, people in the record business have been rockin' in the same ol' boat. They all crooks - I'll say it clear and loud - especially the big ones.

Groups are corporations now. They have pension plans. Musicians have saw the daylight.

They wasn't gonna give you nothin'. I didn't care as long as they let me play my music. Cash on the spot... You cheat me and I'm gonna get me some money, too.

I have heartaches, I have blues. No matter what you got, the blues is there. 'Cause that's all I know - the blues. And I can sing the blues so deep until you can have this room full of money and I can give you the blues.

I went on to Cincinnati. I had got a taste of the big cities and them bright lights. I stayed there until I was about 18 or 19 and then I went on to Detroit.

I don't do nothing I don't want to do.

If they played more blues, people would just get it - they try to hold it back but just about can't hold it back now because the blues is really going.

I am a happy man. I've had a good life.

I like dropping into a small club and playing with some people, trying to help them get a start.

I want to play music when I want, write a song if I want or watch a baseball game if I want.

It don't take me no three days to record no album.

I've got enough money to live me two lifetimes so I don't have to do nothing I don't want to.

The one thing the blues don't get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people's throat so they got no choice but to listen to it.

I hitchhiked, took trucks 'n' trains - anything that would pick me up. I stopped in Memphis for about six months and they found me and come got me. Stayed about a month an' split again.

I remember back in Detroit, I used to go to the Apex Bar every night after I got off work. The bartender there used to call me Boom Boom. I don't know why, but he did.

I like the small clubs.

I don't play a lot of fancy guitar. I don't want to play it. The kind of guitar I want to play is mean, mean licks.

The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.

Oh, I still like to play and I still play when I want to.

My style is all to myself.

All my life I been doin' what people tell me to do. Now, I'm telling them.

I don't think about time. You're here when you're here. I think about today, staying in tune.

I just get an idea and then all of a sudden I've got a song.

Like you and your woman ain't gettin' along and you're in love. You can't sleep at nights. Your mind is on her - on whatever. You know, that's the blues. You can't hug that money at night. You can't kiss it.

But I don't want to do no big tours or go out on the road.

To hard necessity ones will and fancy must conform.

Fancy your having no sunshine in London yesterday! Here it was glorious, like full summer, and I sat up with the window wide open, listening to the discourse of two amorous thrushes.

Welcome, wild harbinger of spring! To this small nook of earth; Feeling and fancy fondly cling, Round thoughts which owe their birth, To thee, and to the humble spot, Where chance has fixed thy lowly lot.

I decided that I would be one of the biggest new names; and I actually had some little fancy business cards printed up to announce it, 'Count Basie. Beware, the Count is Here.'

There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages.

Well, you know I have an office, my film offices. So I know that syndrome. I fancy offices, so there must be something wrong with me. Even the window cleaner intrigues me. It's a very sexy environment.

I think 'destiny' is just a fancy word for a psychological pattern.

I fancy that no good ideas upon that campaign will be mentioned at any time that did not receive their share of consideration by General Lee.

I fancy our chances at the European Championships.

I would advise you to write, my dear friend, because with your active nature, solitude is simply intolerable to you, and after some time your solitude would become perhaps attractive if you were to people it with creatures of your own fancy.

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.

Gray hairs seem to my fancy like the soft light of the moon, silvering over the evening of life.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

We happened to be in the studio next door and I think Noel Redding came around and said, 'Do you fancy having a sing on this?' We just went and did it and it was great.

The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper... no one cared what he believed about its origin.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.