I don't like to sing loud.

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.

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.

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.

A powerful vision has the therapeutic effect of numbing the cost of what it will cost you.

As the nicknames get shorter, people come closer.

You can't turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again.

The great purpose in life is to take your destiny out of the hands of others.

Their argument, and I think it's a correct one, is that they'll make more money from the trades and the hardcovers if nobody messes with the creative team.

How a hat makes you feel is what a hat is all about.

If you are not an idealist by the time you are twenty you have no heart, but if you are still an idealist by the time you are thirty, you don't have a head.

I thought comedy would be the hardest thing I could do, and if I could do that, I could do anything.

God deliver me from people who are so spiritual that they want to turn everything into perfect contemplation, come what may.

Hurry no man's cattle; you may come to own a donkey yourself