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

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 first love was the sound of guitar.

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.

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.

Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.

See, regardless of what anybody believes who hates me; you ain't gonna make or break me.

Whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it’s like-you just feel dumb. It’s just so stupid.

The enemy is never more unnerving than when he's invisible.

Hip-hop is not the problem, our reality is the problem.

Truth uttered before its time is dangerous.

You may be sure that in this new international system, the American citizen will count for precious little.

I remember when I got my first Adam Sandler CD and it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard in my entire life, and continues to be.

When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems are simultaneously lush and ripe and kind of lazy, yet throbbing with life - like summer itself.