If John Lennon is deported, I'm leaving too...with my musicians..and my marijuana.

I'm the kind of person who can hear that stuff. If you sing along to the radio and you're not going to sing unison with the melody, but find the harmony, I find that pretty easy to do.

Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't mean anything to me. I just wanted to have a hit, I just wanted to be like those people on the radio. It was all of a case of the present tense with no projecting into the future, particularly.

New York, you got money on your mind. And my words won't make a dime's worth a difference, so here's to you New York.

It seems to me that at 19 or 20, a young man is burning to be great at something. I was. You have a vision that's beyond the neighborhood. You want to make a mark while you're alive. You don't know exactly your future, but you want to be great at it. And greatness is an important word. And you dare not tell anybody how extreme and how burning are your visions, because you don't want anybody to mess with them

Never mind the transience of show business and popularity. When we hear Ray Charles, we go, 'That's a great singer.' You don't need a reporter or a writer to tell us. Good is good and it should shine through the years.

I teach well. I used to really like teaching a lot. I enjoyed it a lot and I was good at it.