“My mother was a very beautiful lady, I thought. She was very good to m...” — B. B. King Quote

“My mother was a very beautiful lady, I thought. She was very good to me. I guess - she died when I was nine and a half, but if she had lived, I probably wouldn't be trying to play guitar. She wanted me to be known, but as something else. Not a guitar player.”

“If there was no ladies, I wouldn't wanna be on the planet. Ladies, friends, and music - without those three, I wouldn't wanna be here.”

“Even now, at 82 years old, if I don't learn something every day, you know what I think? It's a day lost. Now, I don't practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I'm doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear.”

“Water from the white fountain didn't taste any better than from the black fountain.”

“I almost chopped my thumb off once. Just before I left home, I was about ten or eleven years old, and I was trying to open a bone. Can you imagine that? A bone! I was trying to get the marrow out of a bone, and I took the ax, and I went to chop it, and something slipped, and the ax went right down there and damn near cut it off.”

“At some point, I picked up an old library copy of 'To The Lighthouse' someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn't stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.”

“My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.”

“When you're singing before 15,000 people at a summer concert outside, you need to look beautiful, because that's what people want.”

“Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.”

“I never understood when people go, 'Oh my gosh, it's so easy being pregnant.' No, it's hard. It's the most beautiful thing, yes, but it's hard.”

“Fashion has always captivated me because, like I said, it has the potential to create narratives about what's beautiful, aspirational, chic, masculine, feminine, glamorous, etc. Generally, this power is dispatched in useless ways.”