Wilson Pickett

I perform as much as I can, to the extent I don't want to sell myself out.

I live in Virginia alone, and sometimes there's too much time to think. So you turn on the TV, but sometimes that don't do, so you turn the music on, and sometimes that don't do, and so you try and write a song, and sometimes that don't do... So you just take it as it comes.

All my ideas have blown away with the wind.

Sometimes it's more than you can bear to be on the road and take care of all that other stuff.

The baddest woman in my book... my mother. I get scared of her now. She used to hit me with anything, skillets, stove wood.

I heard Otis Redding singing 'These Arms of Mine' and I knew that was the band I needed.

I had recorded a song 'If You Need Me' for the Correc-Tone label, but it was a small label and distribution was a problem.

Me, I'm very happy with the fruit I've gotten out of my career.

If I wasn't in show business I don't know what I would have been - a wanderer or something, you know? But God blessed me with the talent and the chance. I knocked on enough doors, and this is what I can give myself credit for.

I thought wasn't nobody supposed to get gold records except those people on Motown, like Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross.

Detroit, my lord, what a place.

I write about things that are really happening, serious things.

I have boxes of gospel LPs and 78s. The Davis Sisters, the Soul Stirrers, the Pilgrim Travellers. I love all that.

Soul is R&B.

The R&B will always prevail. It will always last. The blues will always last.

Motown was pop, Atlantic was R&B.

I used to get a lot of fan mail.

If I'm not getting played on the radio and I'm not making any money, I have nothing to lose by telling the truth.

Anytime you've got artists singing songs, doing grooves that they don't want to do, it's terrible.

I can't keep singing 'Midnight Hour' for the rest of life. I gotta change.

Disco music can only take you so far because it's plastic.

All disco singers are non-professionals who can't do live shows. It loses what black people have created.

There are no Soul singer Wilson Pickett singers in disco.

I don't want to die on the stage.

You can talk about all the great guitarists you want Jimi Hendrix or whoever but as far as I'm concerned, Duane Allman is the best. No one ever played like him.