Top 30 Sly Quotes

I watched the Tyson-Holyfield fight with Stallone. I remember when Tyson bit him, Sly looked at me and said, ‘I think he bit him’. I said, ‘I think you’re right, Rock.’

The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great guitar player Jimi Hendrix, and a new group… Sly and the Family Stone, led by Sly Stewart from San Francisco.

I love Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder, and I want my music to reflect some of that.

I never thought for one second I’d be able to play with a real band. When I was in high school, I went through a lot of bad treatment and was called a lot of names by boys because I wanted to play. Sly was different.

When I was young in L.A. and I couldn’t get into clubs or restaurants, I would call imitating celebrities and get a table, and it would work often. I was either Stallone or Mickey Rourke: ‘This is Sly. I may be late, but my buddy Hank will be there early.’

Believe it or not, I got into the charismatic, shady, sly heart of Sedgewick Bell by watching CNN and C-SPAN.

In soccer, you have to be sly.

I’m touched by the Beatles. I want some of the music I do to reflect that. Here I am. I love Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder, and I want my music to reflect some of that. Here I am. I’m touched by Jon Hendricks. I want some of my music to reflect that. And when I write, you’re going to hear it.

Prince got some Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix and Sly in him, also, even Little Richard. He’s a mixture of all those guys and Duke Ellington.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

‘Homefront’ was written by Sylvester Stallone. He actually wrote it for himself, which is, for me, an amazing privilege: To be handed a script by Sly that he wrote for himself, that he asked me to do.

Sly always had us rehearsing, and he always had something planned out that he wanted us to do. So it wasn’t ever like, ‘Well what should we work on?’ It was never that. He always had the plan, ‘This is what we’re going to do today, shoop shoop shoop shoop,’ and everybody’s minds were in the same direction.

I watched Sly Stallone and the ‘Rocky’ movies over and over again. They were fantastic.

My role model is Sly Stallone.

Sometimes, though only in my most unguarded moments, I can still think of Annette Winters as my first love. At fifteen, she was tall, slender, very dark: an intelligent, sly girl possessed of what I think of now, though I didn’t think of then, as a kind of debatable beauty.

Long before ‘American Idol’, people used to call me a diva. And I be like, ‘Hold on, are you calling me something else on the sly? You gonna call me a diva, call me a good diva.’

In ‘Plutarch,’ her voice begins to come out; there are actual 2,000-year-old quotes from Cleopatra, and they are sly and saucy.

I’ve met a lot of big stars who have humility. Sly Stallone is a very humble guy. Robert DeNiro is a really humble guy. Some of the women aren’t so humble for some reason. I don’t know why.

That’s one thing I loved about coming up when we came up. When you had groups like Mandrill and Earth, Wind & Fire, Sly Stone, and on and on and on, the Brothers Johnson, whatever. Everybody, Ohio Players. Groups wanted to be just themselves.

I didn’t even know how to judge ‘Die Hard 1.’ It’s not anything I know how to judge. I’d never seen an action movie. I’d never seen a Sly Stallone movie or an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie or a Charles Bronson movie. And that is the truth.

These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.

When I lived in Louisiana, ‘Django Unchained’ was shot at my neighbor’s house. They shot a Sly Stallone movie in my gym.

I could be imagining it, but I believe myself to have exchanged sly, understanding nods with other people I see attending movies alone on Christmas Day.

May God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons – and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them; they run off – and how will you ever get control of them again!

I saw ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine once, and they were talking about the top 50 songs, and there wasn’t one Sly song; how does that happen? But, Sly isn’t the type to brown nose for props. He’s always known what he had, what he was capable of; I’m just proud that he took the time and effort to put it to music.

Unless you’re trying to make a movie on the sly, there’s no way to get around this. If you want to use public spaces, film on the streets, have the cooperation of the police, you have to have a permit.

History is a sly boots, and for a generation of blacks that cannot identify with the frustrations of Jim Crow, and for whites who cannot understand the hard deal that faces working-class blacks, it is difficult to reconcile Hughes’s reputation as a poet-hero with his topical verse and uncomplicated prose.

I came along with that crowd of singer-songwriters who were able to make their own statements in such a personal way that it changed the industry: Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Sly and the Family Stone.

I’ve always loved black culture; I don’t know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I’m older – I’m in my early 50s – so you’ll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

Sly Stone made such a huge contribution to the good feeling in the universe, and I love him as a singer.