B. B. King Quotes

The blues is life itself.

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.

I love the fact that people can relate to what I'm saying, even if it's not for the same subject I was writing about. That is the power of real music and real expression.

Because they're my stories, they're my version of events of the past three years. But I really hope people can hear their own stories within the songs and they can become our version of events.

I love relatable stories.

I think you can feel the pain I've experienced in my music. It's something that a lot of people can relate to.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone's singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That's the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

I feel like a lot of people can relate to my music.

And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy. It climbs the same way on damp walls. You are to blame for this cruel sport. They are fleeing from my dark lair. You fill everything, you fill everything. Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy, and they are more used to my sadness than you are. Now I want them to say what I want to say to you to make you hear as I want you to hear me.

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.

That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

I think there's just a lot of compassion in art. Again, when you're doing something that resonates with somebody else, you're going through an experience another person has had, whether it's been a painful experience or a joyous experience or a happy experience.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours

The character is close to me, except that I haven't lived through those situations, so it's not completely me.

If they played more blues, people would just get it - they try to hold it back but just about can't hold it back now because the blues is really going.

I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.

I tell stories about people audiences might think they have nothing in common with, then they emotionally connect with them and find they're not different at all.

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

Sometimes I think to get to the emotional level of a scene, you don't necessarily have to have experienced the exact thing that person has experienced, but whatever you have in your life that has gotten you to that place is usually enough.

Any artist, the work you do, if it's a painting or if it's a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else's life. That's what's fun about sharing art.

Country music busts the wall between performer and audience. There's a connection because there's a vulnerability, a confessional quality, to so much of the songwriting. Those lyrics take you in.

Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

If you learn the language of loss early, I think you seek out others who have experienced the same thing, who speak that same language of loss.

The great thing about a song is that no one has to know your story. But if you tell it in a way that has clarity and means something to somebody else, then it can apply to their story.