I don't have any particular goals in making a recording. In a way the recording is itself the goal. The music comes into my mind, and from there the main job is to give form to it.
My real passion is for opera. It was born and developed by listening to records, and my dream as a child was to record entire operas when I grew up, and this dream came true.
It's typical of record companies. They sign you because you're unique, and then they want to put you in a mold so they can sell records.
In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can't say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.
There's a guy at the record company who's 30, and he says, I would not listen to these songs except in this context. Somehow the recording process, the arrangements, make it more accessible.
More than half of all the hip hop record sales are white people, and I think that might be a result of my record helping people to accept hip hop.
Interested listeners have only to hear the recording to find out if those guys, who go to such pains to undervalue my work, are right. All people have to do is listen to realize it is a beautiful record.
You know, in the days when I started, if you had Chet Atkins' name on your record as a producer and it was on RCA, you could work the road. It didn't have to be a big hit record, it just had to have that on it.
I would go to radio stations and they were supposed to be interviewing me and playing my record and they would say, We're playing too many women right now, we can't play your record.
I'm in the acting business. That's the ego business.
I find the business world hard.
Business leaders cannot be bystanders.
The business model of racing is not a pretty one.
The American formula for creating business is not to have the government create business.
The music business doesn't interest me anymore.
Washington has to become an ally of business, not the opposition of business.
When I came back into show business in '88 after spending 20-odd years in the civil service, it wasn't planned.
I want to be in this business as long as this business will have me.
I don't think about records.
The goal is to build a profitable business, not maintain an expensive hobby that will leave you in the poorhouse.
Learning to pray doesn't offer us a less busy life; it offersus aless busy heart.
