I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.

And when you're poor, you grow up fast.

Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.

Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you - and kill you the long, slow, hard way.

I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.

So I asked him to play "Trav'lin' All Alone." That came closer than anything to the way I felt. And some part of it must have come across. The whole joint quieted down. If someone had dropped a pin, it would have sounded like a bomb. When I finished, everybody in the joint was crying in their beer, and I picked thirty-eight bucks up off the floor. . . . When I showed Mom the money for the rent and told her I had a regular job singing for eighteen dollars a week, she could hardly believe it.

The whole basis of my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can't sing.