Ernest Gaines Quotes

Ralph Lemon is my idol. But music is my biggest passion. Frank Ocean's 'Pyramids' is on repeat. That kind of stuff with Frank Ocean makes me cry.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

White folks hear the blues come out, but they don't know how it got there.

I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy.

Soul lyrics, soul music came at about the same time as the civil rights movement, and it's very possible that one influenced the other.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.

Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

The blues is nothing but a story... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?

A whole generation of young whites have involved themselves with traditional Negro music.

The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape - affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark.

We are trying to prove that the blues lives on forever and anybody in this place can sing the blues.

To me, blues is more of a feel and a vibe, rather than sitting there and saying, 'Well, I'm gonna play bluesy now.'

White artists have made millions of dollars off music they stole from black artists. I don't blame all the white artists. I'm a huge Stevie Ray Vaughn fan, and he was always very gracious about where he learned his music. But a lot of the time, you'd think the white guys thought it up. Hey, hasn't anyone heard of Muddy Waters?

I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.

I'm an old soul. The blues, especially older blues, is the human element that kind of gives the music soul, and I think that maybe not enough people connect to the blues. It's a very powerful place to be; and if you can express that to an audience, I think that you can express a lot through that.

My dad was a club musician. He was always playing guitar and playing loads of soul records and '60s rock n' roll. Whenever he used to cook, he used to play Donny Hathaway, Aretha Franklin, The Kinks, and the Spencer Davis Group - a lot of really earthy things.

I spent a lot of time drawing and writing little comic books, and my mom was a rapper, so I would steal her instrumentals.

You cannot have black music without something soulful in it, whether it's lyrically, how it's performed, or how it's expressed.

We had some Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross, but there's a lot of hip-hop and other black music that I just never grew up on. My parents didn't listen to anything other than black gospel.

This is one of the major purposes of soul and jazz music; to state what you feel.

If nothing else, we grew up loving the old blues artists and Ray Charles.