I really love that type of music where someone can take a guitar or light instrumentation and a beautiful voice and can send me somewhere.

I have been a provoker and I'll probably always be one in the public arena for the rest of my life.

It's like soul music, isn't it all soul music? Otherwise what is it, non-soul music? I-have-no-soul music? Soulless music? People need to put a name on something to identify it, and I understand it.

The pleasure of other people is a byproduct of the pleasure that comes from yourself so I cannot judge or look down on someone who does whatever they feel like doing.

Anything lower than mid-six figures is not going to get me interested in that. And honestly, I just don't want to.

If tears were liquor/ I'd have drunk myself sick.

I've never presented myself as anything less than a flawed person.

When you get a chance to play with people - informally is one thing, but when you hook up and make something that's going to last or mean something to someone, I take it very seriously.

I'm a very private person. What I did in the past or what somebody heard me do or has a bootleg of me doing...well, if you have a bootleg, then I did it.

I think you can find yourself in life perhaps not really being the master of your own life and it is within your own will and tenacity whether you switch the roles or not.

You make music to move people and you don't get to pick who you move. You just don't. It's exclusionary and elitist and I just never felt that way about music, of all things. The great unifier.

The poor schlemiel is a man who falls on his back and breaks his nose.

Phoenix, n. The classical prototype of the modern 'small hot bird.'

The diffusion of a universalist culture and of a pedagogy of peace appears more than ever to be the path that we must follow for the salvation of all nations on earth.

You don't spend your money while you're making it. You don't have time.

I worked nightclubs all through my 20s, and I was a teetotaler.

Success is to be Happy in Life.

Russia hasn't paid any attention to ISIS. They're interested in keeping Assad in power.

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose.

More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television... because you are supplying just about everything... you're a creator.

When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.