B. B. King

I like jazz, rock n’ roll, some hip hop – I can’t think of any music I don’t like.

Any time that people think enough of you to put up something that’s everlasting is only going to make you feel good.

Touring a segregated America – forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most ‘cos you don’t realise the damage. You hold it in. You feel empty, like someone reached in and pulled out your guts. You feel hurt and dirty, less than a person.

T-Bone was, to me, that sound of being in heaven.

Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but no one wants to die to get there!

Notes are expensive… spend them wisely!

I’ve been told that nobody sings the word ‘hunger’ like I do.

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

Jazz is a work in progress. We’ll be defining traditions in Jazz for 200-300 years.

Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

I always play what I feel. I always feel like me, but I’m a different me every day. I get ideas from everything. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night, but differently each time.

I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.

Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents. There must be respect for the people that have gone before.

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

[on Glastonbury] I started off the show and I completely messed up the music. And me, as you can imagine by this phone call, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. So it really put me into a slightly depressed state.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

I have a sense of the importance of music and how powerful it is to bring people together.