B. B. King

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

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

I’m still searching even today for a sound, like the guy that’s searching for a home. I haven’t been able to find that completely. I’m satisfied at times with the sound of my guitar… but it is a little sound that I hear but I can’t tell anybody about it. I don’t know how. But if I ever get it, I’ll know.

When you don’t have much money, you worry that they’ll just put you in the ground someplace and your loved ones won’t know where you are.

I’ve said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

I don’t think it’s meant for man to know everything at once.

Relationships are truly like a garden, if you tend it, water it, weed it and feed it, it will grow into a beautiful garden. If you only go out there every few weeks to look it over for a few moments, what do you think it’s going to look like in a few months? It’s going to be a weed patch. It will disappear.

I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up.

You know, it’s possible for two humans to be in a relationship without there needing to be some public reason for that relationship.

Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep burning, unquenchable.

“They stood there pretending to be just friends when all the while everyone in the room could plainly see that they were only existing for each other.

Take it from a guy: If you’re in love with somebody, you will swim the stream, you will climb the mountain, you will slay the dragon. You’re going to get to her somehow, some way.

The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one’s relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident.

I only f**k with people who are secure enough to be happy for me and hype me up. I don’t want any ‘friends’ who fall silent during my success.

Breaking up is a natural evolution when you try to figure out what you want in life. If you’re with an individual who isn’t moving in the same direction and at the same rate that you are, it ain’t going to work.

I think I had the best of James [Taylor]. I mean, I was so in love with him. Not with blinders on – I was in love with him because he is a remarkable man, and he gave me a tremendous amount.

I was lucky I always got along with girls. It was never like a big deal. I had a lot of girls that I was friends with that I wasn’t sexual with. I think having two older sisters made me comfortable like that. I just like people, so I can just go up and say whatever.

I probably didn’t handle things as diplomatically as I should.

When you get married, your loyalty, first and foremost, is to your spouse, and to the family that you create together.

Your experience will be a lesson to all of us men to be careful not to marry ladies in very high positions.

Sometimes if you’re lucky, someone comes into your life who’ll take up a place in your heart that no one else can fill, someone who’s tighter than a twin, more with you than your own shadow, who gets deeper under your skin than your own blood and bones