My first love was the sound of guitar.

I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.

My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I'm not a jazz singer.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

I was a guitar player first off.

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

If you learn how to forgive others for not being strong, then people can learn how to forgive you for your own issues.

Jealousy is beautiful only on a young and ardent face. After the first wrinkles, trust must return.

On the outside one is a star. But in reality, one is completely alone, doubting everything. To experience this loneliness of soul is the hardest thing in the world.

What are these voices outside love's open door, make us throw off our contentment, and beg for something more?

We were all imitative. We all wandered in after Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring we weren't virgins, whether we were or not.

Sometimes, the loneliness probably got to be too much and anyone seemed better than no one.

I still say I can do whatever I want as long as I'm not hurting anybody else. I don't understand why more people aren't like that.

We first have to find the way of freedom from involvement before we can introduce freedom in involvement.