I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.

You get a heck of a sound from the church. Can't you hear it in my voice?

Robert Johnson? No, I didn't know him, personally.

Our little house was way back in the country. We had one house close to us, and hell the next one would've been a mile. If you got sick, you could holler and wouldn't nobody hear you.

I went to school, but they didn't give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age.

I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.

There's no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I'm playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues - the blues we used to have when we had no money.

I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn't play ball too good - I hurt my finger, and I stopped that. I couldn't preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing.

Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.

That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.

I was so wild and crazy and dumb in my car. It didn't run but 30 miles an hour. You made do.

Now that I'm gettin' old enough to get some money, I'd like to have some money. I don't get much made, I need to conquer a big chunk of money. Not quit playin' but quit playin' so hard.

I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.

Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.

Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.

I stone got crazy when I saw somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn.

Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.

If you got something you don't want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.

I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing.

My grandmother, she say I shouldn't be playing. I should go to church. Fially, I say I'm going do this, I'm going do it. And she got where she didn't bother me about it.

I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.

I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?

I was always singing the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there-in Mississippi.

Going to Chicago was like going out of the world.

The thing about San Francisco is that it has this kind of magical quality.

In a photo, you just do a click, but in art you have to put in so much energy. This concentration of energy and attention says something that other media cannot say.

Scientists are being portrayed by much of the power structure in politics and business as having a vested interest - that they're just out to get more grant money by exaggerating the threats.

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Insurance companies can no longer refuse to cover Americans with pre-existing conditions. That's what change looks like.

The fact that a New Hampshire legislator's position is not seen as a career or a way of supporting a family has meant that it draws women. At times, I think men who might be looking for a paid career have known that they couldn't make one out of serving in the legislature. So there's a little more space for women.

Do whatever rejuvenates you. It might be a cooking class, cocktails with the girls, or just private time with the hubby. We all have our moments where we run out of steam because we've given everything we've got to everyone else. Whoever decided that was a good thing? It's not. Everyone needs to refuel.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

My audience knows me, and I wear beautiful clothes as a badge of honor. They remember where I came from.

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

But having said that, what's happening with campaign finance reform and our political culture is devastating.

Romney has to convince the American public that they need to do something they're not usually inclined to do - replace a sitting president with a challenger. And unlike in 1980 and 1992, when the public was persuaded to do just that, the incumbent president has not been weakened by a primary opponent.

Marriage, laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence.

WordPress makes it drop-dead easy to start a site. Take my advice and go do it.

It was very difficult for me to be the only lyricist in the band.

The story of America's quest for freedom is inscribed on her history in the blood of her patriots.

Skiing is the pleasurable part of alpinism - way more pleasurable and fun than alpine climbing.

I think hip-hop is no more misogynistic than America is as a society. I just think hip-hop is a lot more brash, a lot more bold, a lot more loquacious. There are a lot more words that go into a hip-hop song than go into a regular song.

The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life.

I don't take pictures when I'm with my kids, for the sake of my kids. It's important when you're as busy as I am that you give your kids your time when you're with them, and nothing compromises that. I've been lucky enough to have fans that understand that.

'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' Big, big, big smash for me. My birth of the love of cinema was born with 'Close Encounters' and '2001.' Those sci-fi movies I saw when I was a little kid.

I think, in Japan, animation isn't relegated to being a genre unto itself. It's just a medium by which you can tell any number of stories, be it horror or action or adventure or drama or whatever, and we're trying to do that as well. Every film that you go see from Pixar, we're hoping is a little bit of a surprise.

The key to personal style is understanding your individual beauty enough to know which looks will work for you and which probably won't.

When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.

I am crushing it.