Lots of the bands [in New Orleans] couldn't read too much music. So they used a fiddle to play the lead - a fiddle player could read - and that was to give them some protection.

Respect your own creativity and respect the creativity and creative space of other people.

I'd advise you to visit New Orleans before you pass away. I really would. Because if you die without seeing New Orleans, you wasted half your life.

The New Orleans bands, you see, didn't play with a flat sound. They'd shade the music. After the band had played with the two or three horns blowing, they'd let the rhythm have it.

Everything in New Orleans was competitive. People would always be betting on who was the best and the greatest in everything. That's where the battles of music came in.

Progress in the Christian life is exactly equal to the growing knowledge we gain of the Triune God in personal experience.

After 9/11 and the impending actors' strike of a few years ago, roles dried up for everyone.

I'm not going anywhere without you. We're swimming to China together. And if the worst happens, I'm dying with you before I'm living without you.

Leaving American disaster victims to languish is morally reprehensible and un-American.

I had no interest in being your basic vanilla girl. I've been lucky enough that I haven't had to play that.

I don't think that good politics ever excuse a bad song.

Dismiss the old horse in good time, lest he fail in the lists and the spectators laugh.

I don't think that boxing historians have been able to find a case in which a great fighter, or a fighter presumed to be a great fighter, came to such an ignominious end.

Once you become the mommy or daddy in your child's world, it is the only world in which you exist, no matter how much you fancy there is a separate world of your own.

The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.