I came here with something in me that I inherited from my folks. So I'm going to do something called life and times.

Once you discover that you can, then you must.

Before I get out of bed, I am saying thank you. I know how important it is to be thankful.

I would still be singing, because it's part of my heart and my soul, and it lifts me up. Find something you would do for free.

I don't know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago.

You have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the Blues.

It's all background experience and listening and exposure. That's why it's so important for people today and during any time to expose your children to lots of different kinds of things.

To sing the ballad with a knowingness about what you are talking about. If it's somebody else's lyric, and the message is a little unusual for you, it requires that you learn that new message.

I sang do-wop on the street corner before it was called do-wop.

I did a concert at five years old in the garden of one of the church members, and we raised some money to buy a new piano in our little church.

I know more polkas than Frankie Yankovic. I grew up next door to the Polka Tavern in Milwaukee. I can sing some polkas. And proud of that.

You don't deserve to understand truth if all that you want is just the normal life.

Zachary smiles, and I wonder if he's felling different. Because standing out here waist deep in Gossimer Lake, next to my best friend, I'm feeling different-light and good and maybe even holy.

Joy is not something you look for, it is simply something you have to choose to apply.

No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.

When you feel like this isn't your business, get out of the business.

Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.

Since trifles make the sum of human things, And half our misery from our foibles springs.

Much discussion of money involves a heavy overlay of priestly incantation.

I'd love to play in, like, a 'Lord of the Rings,' or something like that, or a James Bond or, you know, just something like with action, shooting.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.