Chuck Berry

“I have lots of ambition!”

“I eat meat daily. I'm not Jewish. I'm not Arabic. What's the kind of person that doesn't eat meat? That's right - I'm not a vegetarian.”

“If I wasn't a musician, I'd take up the law. They are the rottenest, wealthiest people in America.”

“A contract is an ask game, and if it asks for an hour, and I submit to an hour, then it's an hour. When I look at a contract, I look at the obligation - where, when, how long, the compensation. If I agree to it, that's the way it is. I have an obligation. They have an obligation.”

“I made records for people who would buy them. No color, no ethnic, no political - I don't want that, never did.”

“Music should be made to make people forget their problems, if only for a short while.”

“The world has done nothing to me that I haven't done with the world.”

“I used to work at Kroger's. When the store opened, you were there. When I worked in an automobile plant, you punched in. So it showed if you were a minute late. If you have a paid job, you show up.”

“Maybe it is true what they say, that playing these Chuck Berry songs is easy. But try singing them. The words come out hard, like bullets.”

“Praise doesn't mean anything to me. I don't judge myself.”

“If the people in the audience are talking, you're being ignored. If the people are gazing at you, you've got something they want to hear.”

“Science and religion are both the same thing. They're there; they're life. If it's not science, it's not a fact.”

“In the Fifties, there were certain places we couldn't ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in the White House. You have to feel good about it.”

“My 12th was my most Christian and most boring year of my life. Try as I did, day after day, to cling to righteousness, I was washed down in suds of sinful surroundings.”

“My father married once. I married once. This is a conviction of ours. This is the way we grew up.”

“I'm thankful for each and every day. We never know when time is up.”

“My dad was the cause of me being in show business. He was not only in poetry but in acting a bit. He was Mordecai in the play 'A Dream of Queen Esther.'”

“In a Toyota, the cops don't think about stopping you so much.”

“Had I been pushed like Colonel Parker pushed Elvis, had I been a white boy like Elvis, sure, it would have been different.”

“That's all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction - I don't think anyone could know how much it really means.”