I write emotional music.

Any good music must be an innovation.

I'm not an intellectual composer.

Under my contract with Capitol, I have complete freedom to do just about anything I want in my own way.

Regardless of who originally made it popular, any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers.

I aim my arrangements at what will fit and colorfully frame the song in the best way possible.

I did the Broadway album unfortunately in a year when there were no hits.

I love doing concert music.

When I want 30 musicians in the orchestra, I get 30.

That was when the Spanish came in and conquered the Aztecs. I thought that was a clever thing.

In a sense, a hit belongs to the person who made it popular, but if a tune is good enough to attain tremendous success, then it certainly deserves more than one version, one treatment, one approach.

The mystery of death is a certainty, but mystery of love is everlasting.

Existence was never originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me among the rest.

Are you able to open to the possibility that what you want is not what you need right now? If it was what you needed it would be in your life, right now, and it would come effortlessly.

To pity distress is but human to relieve it is Godlike.

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

Those watercolourists who work from light to dark know that the darks do the damage.

I have got one of those faces that change every day: you can dress me up, make me look vampy and then make me look 12 years old. But don't all women do this thing? We all take on these roles.

Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population.

Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream

When we read history we find that in all ages people have thought, this is the dark age.