Guilt is the major motivating force in my life.

If life can end in one minute - so damn quickly with no damn warning - you better do what you want to do now right this minute. Because your next minute might not happen.

Singers come and go; the music business waxes and wanes. The blues are popular and unpopular, often at the same time.

I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

Marcia was incredibly organized, obsessively neat ... I mean she folded her underwear like origami.

Yiddish is the voice of exile, the tongue of ghettos, but I'll shed a tear when it joins ancient Greek and dead Latin. For gossip and insult, you can't beat Yiddish.

Record company execs eat their young, I swear to God.

Probably the only thing my mom and dad agreed on was the vital importance of guilt.

I have no-fail chemistry. A guy turns me on, he's the wrong one for me.

We pushed to the edge of recklessness, yet I felt safe.

Another note to self

People like rumors. They're going to say things like, 'You was at the club with Lil' Kim, and you and Kanye West got into a fist fight.' You can't get upset. You've got to keep hope alive.

I want to keep a thread between the studio and the stage, and I want to flow more easily from one to the other.

Civilised adults do not take apple juice with dinner.

My parents are both from Vermont, very old-fashioned New England. We heated our house with wood my father chopped. My mom grew all of our food. We were very underexposed to everything.

Presents at once? That's good. He is sure to succeed.

What did John Ashcroft say about moderates, he said, quote, there are two things you find in the middle of the road, a moderate and a dead skunk and I don't want to be either.

Dirk Nowitzki will be better than Larry Bird. I'm a legend killer.

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.