The deals that were made for Black artists at that time were not the deals that were made for white artists.

I didn't need to depend on the record company to publish my records.

Apollo Records signed me for my gospel ability.

I'm still amazed people remembered and didn't give up on me.

The secret was to just be cool, stay in God's graces, and work it out.

I walked out of the Chinese restaurant with a fat check, a record deal, and a box of shrimp egg foo yung!

The deals that were made for Black artists at that time were not the deals that were made for white artists.

I don't need to make a fortune, I need to survive.

Leonard Chess passed, and that was the end of the Chess label for that time.

I didn't do the marching down the streets, jumping in front of the lines and holding hands... that wasn't me.

I want to be a soul singer.

I was signed to MGM. I was in Vegas for sixteen weeks at the Sands Hotel.

That was my choice at that time, and I still say Nixon was a great president. A very beautiful and wise man.

As you grow older, you learn to understand life a little better.

You gotta do it with class and integrity. If not, you're gonna drag yourself through the mud.

But we didn't have the financial structure, like the right attorneys, the right managers, the right accountants, and we were going against the grain of what black entertainers is supposed to do.

We were using the record as a tool to invest money into real estate all through the South, because we were living in an era where the South was changing.

We had some problems - my children were kidnapped during that time, and it just changed my whole way of thinking, from being in show business and everything else.

If we could buy these properties and then invest in the Black community, with our own McDonald's, with our own Kentucky Fried Chickens, it was gonna be a great move.

I didn't need to borrow money from the record company, because if I had my own publishing company, and I had my own writers, I'd have enough to get and do whatever I wanted to do.

I should have my own publishing companies.

We were grooving, at that point, in the same direction, but remember, Roy Hamilton and myself were going into a path and a direction that had no programming.

My manager was Buddy Glee, who put me together with Mike Curb, and was basically the idea to bring some soul to the label and bring something different to the label besides the Hank Williams situation.

Sometimes its controversy, but we all have our choices that we make.

As you grow older you learn to understand life a little better.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

I got to sit down with people who I admired, and have conversations with some of the greatest thinkers and artists and performers. It's a huge privilege for me to be a journalist.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.

A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.

The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.

Because when the film was first mooted, the Beatles didn't like the idea at all. In fact they wouldn't have any part in it. And when Brian had committed them, it was part of a deal he did with United Artists, I think.

Artists are like everybody else.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

My proudest achievement has been the success of the shows and artists I have been involved with, because they were made in Britain.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

I want to run for the Senate from Tennessee. Not now, but when I'm 50, when music dies down a little bit. I know lots of artists and actors have those delusions of grandeur, but ever since I was a kid, it's been of interest to me.

Let's look at people as artists and try to support them; just because Picasso painted a couple of bad paintings, that's no reason to say he's a lousy painter.

Idol has pretty much taken me out of my recording and out of my choreography. I have managed to slip in some choreography jobs. And I've been writing songs for other artists.

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.