Everybody's a work in progress. I'm a work in progress. I mean, I've never arrived. I'm still learning all the time.

When a human being without amplification makes a sound that is high and loud, it is almost unworldly.

Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.

We are unique, each human voice, not because we are completely self-generated, but because of who we choose to assemble the countless factors that made us.

We sing with the entire body. The sounds that we make emanate not just from the head, but from the whole heart and soul, and, most important, the gut.

I don't want to be somebody who stands still and sings pretty. Each song is a world. Each song is a story. I don't achieve nearly what I want.

There's no performance where I never have to think about setting up a phrase or making a technical adjustment while I'm performing.

Someone once said that there are probably seven naturally good singing days in a year-and those are days you won't be booked. What we must learn is how to sing through all the other days.

It is our responsibility to learn how to speak to an audience that is less informed about music, to give it a reason to want to come and see us instead of going to the movies.

I don't want to record anything unless it can be great and genuinely interesting.

I've spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional, about that music.

A great voice is a unique instrument, not to sound like another instrument, but to be played like one.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtures are of no avail.

Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

May you always work like you don't need the money; May you always love like you've never been hurt; and May you always dance like there's nobody watching.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

Well, I am a Christian who believes that there are certainly many more paths to God other than Christianity.

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.

There's a buzz to failing and not dying.