If life can end in one minute - so damn quickly with no damn warning - you better do what you want to do now right this minute. Because your next minute might not happen.

Singers come and go; the music business waxes and wanes. The blues are popular and unpopular, often at the same time.

I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

Marcia was incredibly organized, obsessively neat ... I mean she folded her underwear like origami.

Yiddish is the voice of exile, the tongue of ghettos, but I'll shed a tear when it joins ancient Greek and dead Latin. For gossip and insult, you can't beat Yiddish.

Guilt is the major motivating force in my life.

Record company execs eat their young, I swear to God.

Probably the only thing my mom and dad agreed on was the vital importance of guilt.

I have no-fail chemistry. A guy turns me on, he's the wrong one for me.

An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.

...every time I look at you autumn leaves come in between - does it matter they're the color of your hair - or they still fall in my memory?...

Full of questions and pleas, her eyes seemed to be asking for rescue.

The world's history is constant like the laws of nature and simple like the souls of men.

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Hillary Clinton didn't go to Louisiana. She didn't go to Mexico. She was invited.

What did you do with the time and talents i gave you? God's question.

I like 'Donnie Darko;' it's a cool take on dreams and sleep.

Music I can discover a part of myself that I haven't been able to for a long time, and acting is the opposite. I'm in love with both of them and I would never choose one over the other.

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilised into time and tune.