Quotes on Charles

I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.

I grew up watching period dramas, as we all did in the 1980s and '90s - endless adaptations of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens - and I loved them. But I never saw anyone like me in them, so I decided to find a story to erode the excuses for me not doing one.

When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.

When you work with Ray Charles, Billy Eckstine and Frank Sinatra, and you tell them to jump without a net, you better know what you're talking about. Thank God I was ready for it.