Wilson Pickett

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

“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.”

“I don't do disco.”

“If you leave God and go to the devil, you're going to go to hell.”

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

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

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

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

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

“If you get the disco or rap format on the radio, an R&B record doesn't fit, because it will break up the mood.”

“When I make a record, I want to use some electronics, although I still want to keep things pretty basic.”

“Motown was pop, Atlantic was R&B.”

“People like me and Aretha Franklin and Joe Tex, we had predicted that inside of five years disco would be all over, that it was just a fad. But we didn't anticipate being knocked out of the pocket altogether.”

“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.”

“I'd lived in New Jersey for 30 years. That was long enough. It's too crowded up there, and it's a very dangerous place to live. There's a whole lotta crime.”

“Singing like I do is very hard, and as you get older, it's getting harder and harder all the time.”

“I got very bored with the music business.”

“I took a long rest period. I didn't know heads or tails of what anybody wanted; it seemed as if R&B had been put on the shelf.”

“I used to get a lot of fan mail.”

“All my ideas have blown away with the wind.”