When I sing, the sound is a totally different range, color, all of it. It's all about the breath. You take in a breath and you make a sound.

When a human being without amplification makes a sound that is high and loud, it is almost unworldly.

Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.

We are unique, each human voice, not because we are completely self-generated, but because of who we choose to assemble the countless factors that made us.

We sing with the entire body. The sounds that we make emanate not just from the head, but from the whole heart and soul, and, most important, the gut.

I don't want to be somebody who stands still and sings pretty. Each song is a world. Each song is a story. I don't achieve nearly what I want.

Everybody's a work in progress. I'm a work in progress. I mean, I've never arrived. I'm still learning all the time.

There's no performance where I never have to think about setting up a phrase or making a technical adjustment while I'm performing.

Someone once said that there are probably seven naturally good singing days in a year-and those are days you won't be booked. What we must learn is how to sing through all the other days.

It is our responsibility to learn how to speak to an audience that is less informed about music, to give it a reason to want to come and see us instead of going to the movies.

I don't want to record anything unless it can be great and genuinely interesting.

Passion is not a reaction to an external event. It is the left over emotions from the internal battles you have won that propels you forward.

They were like two pieces of a failed star, drawn together by a shared history and a memory of illicit kisses.

Basicly what I had to do was do a 7 minute board and pitch it to a room of big wigs from the network and based on that they determined if I would get a short or not.

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn't dare do themselves.

If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images.

All the human beings I met were either sure that there would be no afterlife or else that they would get preferential treatment in the hereafter.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

All my life people have called me gifted. Extraordinary. Blessed. I had all these dreams to become something. Someone. No one ever said I couldn't. No one ever said Killer.

A government held together by the bands of reason only, requires much compromise of opinion.