Randy Newman seemed like an even worse singer than me. I liked Ray Charles, Levi Stubbs, Jack Jones, Joe Tex, Wilson Pickett.

Popularity has everything to do with business and nothing to do with music.

It's great to know that our old stuff still sounds good to our fans, just as it's wonderful to think that we've turned a few people on to jazz over the years.

When you get a groove going, time flies.

What a beautiful world this will be What a glorious time to be free

What do you do with what you're given, and how do you transform it into something worthwhile?

Anthemic rock music is inherently fascist - anything intended to move huge masses of people is politically offensive to me.

I like it when songs develop in some way. Four minutes usually isn't enough time for something to develop musically.

We don't think of ourselves as being perfectionists, really. To us it's more about desperately trying to have it sound more or less OK.

I have a critical nature, in the sense that when I look at something I often look for the flaws.

As jazz fans, it was amusing for us to play jazz harmonies on these big, ugly electric guitars.

Violence is temporary, but learning is permanent.

You know what turns dirt into diamonds?""Pressure. Weight. Heat...""The geological equivalent of torture.

She oozes the kind of over-confidence that only comes to people who wear deep red lipstick and sparkly tissue sarees in bright daylight.

The new is not revealed to those whose eyes are fastened in worship upon the old.

Refugees have done more for my heart and my spirit than I can ever express in words.

In the beginning was the word, but it wasn't a fixed number of bits.

As you know, there are al Qaeda operatives that are taken back into Iran, given training as leaders, and they’re moving back into Iraq.

Transparency painted in a picture produces its effect in a different way than opaqueness.

We are to live in eager expectation of our heavenly inheritance.

There’s one thing I will not do, ever: I will never talk to you about things you cannot change. It plants a negativity in the head of a designer or the student, and it’s a distraction.