Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove.

I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.