Somebody called me a 'bruised romantic' once, and I like that.

It may be that my most helpful contributions to music aren't my compact discs but my articles about other great singers of the past for American Heritage magazine.

Thank God for beautiful songs about feeling despair when you yourself are in despair. They really get us through.

Please believe that I do this because I am convinced that my illness cannot be helped for any length of time and I cannot bear to be a burden on anyone any longer.

I have complete artistic control, and I just do my best album every time and trust it to fate.

When I dance, I love the romance and sexiness of it, and love having it be clear to both dancers that the man leads! But the man has to know what he's doing!

If I love a song I hope to find a way to get other people to love it too.

I had no desire to become a singer until I heard Billie Holiday. The first time I heard her on a record, it was a revelation. She sounded like a woman singing about herself.

I'm very happy to have a small, long, career instead of one big hit and then oblivion.

If you sing honestly and sincerely to kids, they will respond with all their hearts.

Faith doesn't have to be much. Not any bigger than a mustard seed... That small. Only that much faith you'll need in me, God says, because I am so big. I am the Great I Am. So have faith in me.

Civilization is a race between disaster and education.

It drives me nuts how I rely on my wife for everything. I can't imagine a day without her!

Just before my final year of high school, my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco.

However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.

People who have power respond simply. They have no minds but their own.

I was never able to have three of four beers. One's too many, and ten just ain't enough. Basically it's the way I've been since high school.

I gravitate toward people that are a little more outrageous than I am. And we complement each other well.

My patriotism and my conscience required me to support it and to engage in the debate over whether and how to fight it.

Working in the service of the dead, biographers quit their labors only when the sole remaining task is the impossible- resurrection.