Kind of the sad thing is that - it's still true - a lot of jazz people just listen to jazz, and a lot of hip-hop people just listen to hip-hop, and there's not a lot of crossover, unfortunately.

All my stuff is pretty seamless - like now, while I'm touring [Yesterday I Sang The Blues], today I'm going to go in the studio, I'm writing my next one. For me it's continual.

I don't get writer's block. I don't try to write anything; when something comes, I write it. I just practice and when I get an idea I write it down.

I really like the complexity of jazz, the emotional depth; I feel like there's no other music that's really as satisfying as jazz.

When I start working on a new album, I kind of stop listening to a lot of outside stuff just so I can kind of focus.

I love that [ late-50s Verve recordings] - to me, that's the epitome of vocal jazz. It's my favorite style and era of it.

I'm pretty much always planning two albums ahead.

If you look at the other singers of Billie Holiday's time, they were really trying to entertain. They were trying to make people feel good. They were singing fast - and she was singing the blues.

[Billie Holiday] was keeping it super real, and you can feel that to this day. Everything that she sang, she believed in. So I had to pick songs that I felt the same about.

For me, the difference between a musician reading an arrangement on a piece of paper, and them closing their eyes and listening to what's happening around them and responding to it, is huge.

When I sort of step in my jazz world, it's somewhere between instrumental jazz and vocal jazz.

Art contained an undefined mystery that spoke to her soul.

Every moment you lose your temper, you lose a moment of opportunity to love.

A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.

I find that in life all you can do is try to be honest about who you are and how you're feeling, and trust that it will be received in the correct way.

women and girls begin to bare themselves behind and in front, and there is nobody to punish and hold in check, and besides, God's word is mocked.

I think I always wanted to have adventures in my life. I was always kind of a rambunctious kid.

Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.

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Husbands and wives, have fun with each other. I'm convinced it makes all the difference in the world.