Otis Blackwell

“I never met Elvis. I never met Jerry Lee Lewis. I never met any of them.”

“I wasn't trying to write a 'rock and roll' song. I was just writing a song.”

“They didn't call it rock 'n' roll. They called it 'race' music.”

“You write from what you feel, what you see.”

“They say it’s a million-dollar catalog, but I don’t get a million dollars worth of royalties.”

“My advice to a young songwriter is you have to be persistent.”

“I just had a knack for it. It was a gift from God.”

“I wrote about 1,000 songs all told. I’d come in every day and they’d give me a title or a situation and I’d write a song.”

“Sometimes the melody comes first, sometimes the lyrics. There's no set formula.”

“A song has to tell a story.”

“I learned from the best, people like Louis Jordan.”

“I would hear a phrase on the street and turn it into a song.”

“I was supposed to do a demo of ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ but I was late. Jerry Lee was in the studio, and he played the hell out of it.”

“When I first came up to New York from down South, I was a young man and I was very naive.”

“A lot of writers would just write a song and sell it outright. I was one of them.”