As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.

My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.

My first love was the sound of guitar.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I'm not a jazz singer.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

I was a guitar player first off.

Be aware of the voices in your head. Identify them. Just became you hear it doesn’t mean it’s your voice saying it. And just because you think it doesn’t mean it’s true.

Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word.

We are therefore constantly on the road, straying from one mental image to the next, and identify with these images, and derive our identity from the images.

I don't want to say something and walk away, I want to wake you up and walk with you to achieve your dreams

there is ten times more in the world than would maintain all in yet unknown luxury. Yet how much misery there is in our midst; not because there is not enough, but owing to the misdirection of it.

It is still an open question as to whether mankind or insects shall ultimately inherit the earth. It is my opinion that mankind ... has about a 50-50 chance...

I think it's essential to make new music now, and to try and make epic records now, and not rely on what happened in the past.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

His name was Death. It was pronounced to rhyme with "teeth", but Bitterblue liked to mispronounce it by accident on occassion.

There's always a lot happening. I mean, that's the thing about politics: it's just one damn thing after another!