If life can end in one minute - so damn quickly with no damn warning - you better do what you want to do now right this minute. Because your next minute might not happen.

Probably the only thing my mom and dad agreed on was the vital importance of guilt.

Singers come and go; the music business waxes and wanes. The blues are popular and unpopular, often at the same time.

I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

Plenty of guys are good at sex, but conversation, now there's an art.

Yiddish is the voice of exile, the tongue of ghettos, but I'll shed a tear when it joins ancient Greek and dead Latin. For gossip and insult, you can't beat Yiddish.

Guilt is the major motivating force in my life.