I try to keep my ear to the streets without sacrificing who I am as an artist. If a song needs a drum machine I'll use a drum machine. If it needs a drummer, I'll use a real drummer.

You never know where a blessing can come from.

I play guitar, piano, bass and percussion.

Overall my race hasn't been a problem. I'm a black artist with white skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what's in your own soul.

I always try to be a trend setter. That's what I always tell young people when I'm giving them advice. To go with their heart and don't follow the trends.

OK, so truth hurts - but what else does truth do?

I would walk down the hall with my guitar and play for anyone that would listen. As a young kid I was really driven and I was going to make it happen no matter what.

I still have a passion for the music, which is such a beautiful thing. I still wake up in the middle of the night out of a dream and have a melody in my head, and run to my piano.

I have enough love to last me a lifetime! Thank God I'll never lose my imagination and my passion. That's really what it is. I'm still passionate about what I do.

I dont plan on stopping anytime soon.

My first album came out in 1979.

I was born a sheep & I cannot be a goat through pledge of hands.

I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.

Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister.

Mostly, as I said, a desire to do a bit of good, and the quaint notion that this is what we signed up for, this is the business that we have chosen.

To be fixated on Sahaja Samadhi is to be fixated. To be fixated on the idea of being not fixated is fixation too. All these ideas and definitions about enlightenment become silly.

I haven't shaken my fists at the moon.

Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try.

I deserve passion," she said. "I deserve to be loved- in every way. I deserve a man who'll give his whole heart, not the part he isn't using at the moment.

When you give yourself away you find that a new and more real self has somehow been given to you.

The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.