If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you're going to the bank to borrow money.
B. B. KingRead
I'm more careful about my hands than about what I eat and most anything else, because my hands have been my living. My hands have been able to help me learn. My hands have taken me around the world. So I'm very proud of my hands.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the deep appreciation and significance of hands in the speaker's life as a musician.
B. B. King's quote reflects the importance of his hands not just as tools for playing music, but as a vital part of his identity and experiences. He highlights that his hands have enabled him to learn, travel, and achieve his passions, emphasizing pride in the physical capabilities that have shaped his life and career in music.
In practice
During a speech at a music workshop, one could use the quote to emphasize the importance of practicing and valuing one's craft.
If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you're going to the bank to borrow money.
The way I feel today, as long as my health is good and I can handle myself well and people still come to my concerts, still buy my CDs, I'll keep playing until I feel like I can't.
Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public's going to like, anyway.
A guitar is like an old friend that is there with me.
I have not been a good father, but no father has loved his children more. Like my father, I decided the best thing I could do for my kids was work and provide. Fortunately, I've been able to do that. Unfortunately, my work was on the road, and that's meant a life of one-nighters.
People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.
Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!
Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.
Stand up for yourself and fight for your right to be the artist that you want to be. There's plenty of pressure from outside; people tell you how to dress and how to sing or what to sing, but I always felt like if I'm going to fail or succeed, I want to do it on my own terms.
We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.
Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.
Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
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