When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

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

If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance.