I love orchestrating music and conducting and being on Broadway.

Well, my dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years.

I do the things I like to do. It's sort of a bigger version of having more than one hobby.

New Orleans is my essence, my soul, my muse...

With a tone so rich, I would never be afraid of the dark. Steinway is the only and the best!

There are people who can't stand me, they say, 'God, he makes me sick', or, 'He's creepy', but it doesn't affect me too badly.

'The Christmas Song,' by Nat King Cole, is not only a masterful performance; to me it just sounds like the holidays. I've never sung it, because Nat's version is so perfect. I gotta leave it alone.

With imagination, I'll get there.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.

Safety's just danger, out of place.

In my life I find that memories of the spirit linger and sweeten long after memories of the brain have faded.

I had rather be hissed for a good verse than applauded for a bad one.

If your spirit still looks around at the time of prayer, then it does not yet pray as a monk. You are no better than a man of affairs engaged in a kind of landscape gardening.

I guess I'm happy that I'm getting the attention. Otherwise, I'd just be playing in a local bar in front of my family members, and I'm sure they'd get sick of that in no time

Government is not competent enough to regulate.

Basically, though, I'm just lucky to love what I do for a living.

Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.

Men are not to be judged by what they do not know, but by what they know, and by the manner in which they know it.

Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies.

The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple.

It wouldn't be bad to look like a cross between Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Taylor.