I think that it can be said of a lot of artists, and myself included, that we made the same record over and over from the beginning.

I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.

My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.

My first love was the sound of guitar.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I'm not a jazz singer.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

If practice makes you perfectshouldn't good behavior be addedto the curriculum

Humble leaders trust more easily because they realize that the world does not rest solely on their shoulders.

You are still thinking like a child, talking about friendship and crap. You’ll regret it when you see one of them die in front of you.

When you succumb to cynicism, darkness, pessimism and sarcasm you are amplifying imbalance and negativity.

It's the most extraordinary and saddest thing, the amount of talent out there not being seen.

The soul, in its power, is present in some way in the entire universe, because it apprehends substances which are not included in the body in which it lives, although they are related to it.

For we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.

I love to do fashion. I always put fashion in all of my storytelling because that's what I am, but I'm not selling clothes, I'm telling a story.

I live in racist America and I'm uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do, and I can make a living from it. You can't do much better than that.

The United States spends more money on African aid than any nation on earth.