To me, music is entertainment - what else can it be? In fact, it's the only language I know of that's universal.
Interpretation
Music serves as a universal form of entertainment and communication.
In this quote, Ray Charles emphasizes the significance of music as a universal language that transcends cultural and linguistic barriers. He views music primarily as a source of entertainment, highlighting its role in bringing people together through shared experiences and emotions, regardless of their backgrounds.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the power of music at a community event.
I suppose I've always done my share of crying, especially when there's no other way to contain my feelings. I know that men ain't supposed to cry, but I think that's wrong. Crying's always been a way for me to get things out which are buried deep, deep down. When I sing, I often cry. Crying is feeling, and feeling is being human. Oh yes, I cry.
I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.
Just because you can't see anything , doesn't mean you should shut your eyes.
Any artist, when he goes in to record, should have the feeling that any song he records can be a hit. This may sound egotistical, but it makes sense.
When I started to sing like myself - as opposed to imitating Nat Cole, which I had done for a while - when I started singing like Ray Charles, it had this spiritual and churchy, this religious or gospel sound. It had this holiness and preachy tone to it. It was very controversial. I got a lot of criticism for it.
The important thing is to feel your music, really feel it and believe it.
I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?
Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.
In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.
The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling.
Is the cinema more important than life?
The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.
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