Mavis Staples Quotes

I feel what I sing, and I sing what I feel. Really, that's all I can do.

I've found that in now having experienced what it's like to make records and just through growing up in general that you should be expressive about what's affecting you instead of trying to sing about a subject just for the sake of other people getting something from it.

Music comes from inside. It's not a style. It's just passion.

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

Music is about expressing things you can't in everyday life.

My songs are a direct route into my brain and my heart.

Singing allowed me to express myself in ways that I wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

I think I sound like a fella who's always making a plea through his music. Sort of a plea of sincerity.

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.

It was a really strange way that I came into music. Once I gave voice to it, the pit of emotions that I guess I knew was inside of me for a long time, the stream never really stopped.

My music comes from my emotion, always.

Singing is just another outlet to express what I feel and to show everyone who I really am. I really don't talk about my personal life that much in interviews because that's my life, but with music, the way I write explains who I am.

Music is something that should speak for itself, straight from the heart. It took me a long time to understand that.

Music expresses - you express yourself with music.

I listen to music to when I'm feeling a certain way or to make myself feel a certain way. So why not make my own music inspired by true emotions?

I'm not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

I just sing what I feel in my heart. I ain't trying to prove nothing, and I don't think I ever did.

That part, that internal dialogue that has a lot of ups and downs and darks and lights and stuff - that, I think, is where music comes from. I think the face that you put on when you're talking to people and making small talk, I don't think that's where music comes from.

When you hear me sit at the piano by myself and do one of those super-personal, confessional songs, that's where my true voice is.

I've never been about just trying to do what works. I've been about trying to authentically express how I feel.

Fool," said my muse to me. "Look in thy heart and write.

Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.

The more room you give yourself to express your true thoughts and feelings, the more room there is for your wisdom to emerge.

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.