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

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.

Guilt is the major motivating force in my life.

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.

She didn't struggle and soshe didn't grow

There's always time for tea.

Students rarely disappoint teachers who assure them in advance that they are doomed to failure.

My dad cut my hair once - I wanted a bob and he gave me a bowl cut. That was a tough few years.

When I write I am the real me.

I believe President Bush is one of the most dangerous leaders in the world. He is not in search of peaceful and diplomatic solutions.

The test of an abstract picture, for me, is not my first reaction to it, but how long I can stand it hanging on the wall of a room where I am living.

Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first.

He had the superficial kindness of a good-humored, self-satisfied nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.

No believer lives a spiritually isolated life.