Jazz is the music of unemployment.

Basically I'm in the idea business -- whether it's a musical idea or a spoken idea ... If you wind up with a political system that wants to put idea men out of business, then you have worry on your hands.

I think pop music has done more for oral intercourse than anything else that has ever happened, and vice versa.

What something is depends more on when it is than anything else.

It's fairly obvious, since Richard Nixon, that there is no such thing as a fair deal for any voter in the United States -- You're just not gonna get it. It's a joke -- the people that you vote for, they're the next best thing to criminals. But of course they have money for advertising campaigns that make them look a little bit better than they actually are.

It's raw, unbridled superstition for these people to claim that words can harm you.

Elmore James only knew one lick, but you had the feeling that he meant it.