Charles Bradley

“I'm 63 now, and I need to take care of myself so that I can continue to perform at my best.”

“When I feel it, I got it, 'cause, like, on 'Changes,' I didn't never know what that song was, never knew who it was or who did it, but Tom Brenneck asked me to do that song.”

“Back in the day, I was afraid to speak out. When I get music behind me, it feels like I can soothe the hurt and put it in vocals and say it to the room the way I feel it.”

“I don't go on nobody's stage before I give praise to God.”

“We've got to learn how to not look at creed or color. Look at how beautiful a bouquet of roses looks like - different color roses, all look beautiful. We have to learn how to let our beauty of the color of our roses shine to the world.”

“If you're a real person, I don't care if you blue - I'm going to be your friend. Everybody's tired of all of the hatred and animosity. I just want to live.”

“My biggest struggle is time and trying to create the quality of music that I want.”

“Sometimes I have to run and hide. What I do at home sometimes is, I listen to a CD of the roughness of the ocean. I turn every light off, and I turn the stereo on, and I just go in my mind, cry, talk to God, tell him, 'I'm your child, too.' And I stay in my little solitude until I can get the strength to go outdoors.”

“I was determined not to sit around and watch my life deteriorate. I kept reaching out in hope and honesty that someone would find me. I never gave up hope. I fell flat on my face and got up again.”

“Give your love and never change. Be willing to die for the love you carry inside.”

“If we don't change this world and look inside our differences inside of us, we gonna bring this world back to a hard point.”

“I hope my music can help many nations all over the world see that the true things come out of the earth, and then they go back into the earth. But the true love you have to find within yourself and learn to respect one another from nation to nation.”

“One thing I learned about that I always knew about myself - that I always been afraid of myself.”

“I always try to get in the back of the audience because people really want to get close to me, and I want to get close to them.”

“Everybody tell me everywhere I go that I'm the closest thing to James Brown they ever seen.”

“I'm 62 years old, but I didn't give up on my dreams. I just feel that God heard my cry, and he put the right people in front of me.”

“I did a CD way back in 1989, but I never got it off the ground.”

“James Brown came from that hard, rough life that I came from. He took the blues and added rhythm to it. And he always had the most funkiest band; I liked the way he took his words and mixed it in with the band.”

“I'm trying to stay focused - trying to open up again - and the music really did a lot of greatness for me and meeting a lot of people that really had concern and compassion for me.”

“If we start putting music out constantly where people don't think no more, people go crazy. We're gonna lose the love of heart, of soul. And if the world lose that, I think the world is doomed.”