When I sort of step in my jazz world, it's somewhere between instrumental jazz and vocal jazz.

All my stuff is pretty seamless - like now, while I'm touring [Yesterday I Sang The Blues], today I'm going to go in the studio, I'm writing my next one. For me it's continual.

I don't get writer's block. I don't try to write anything; when something comes, I write it. I just practice and when I get an idea I write it down.

I really like the complexity of jazz, the emotional depth; I feel like there's no other music that's really as satisfying as jazz.

When I start working on a new album, I kind of stop listening to a lot of outside stuff just so I can kind of focus.

I love that [ late-50s Verve recordings] - to me, that's the epitome of vocal jazz. It's my favorite style and era of it.

I'm pretty much always planning two albums ahead.

If you look at the other singers of Billie Holiday's time, they were really trying to entertain. They were trying to make people feel good. They were singing fast - and she was singing the blues.

[Billie Holiday] was keeping it super real, and you can feel that to this day. Everything that she sang, she believed in. So I had to pick songs that I felt the same about.

For me, the difference between a musician reading an arrangement on a piece of paper, and them closing their eyes and listening to what's happening around them and responding to it, is huge.

Kind of the sad thing is that - it's still true - a lot of jazz people just listen to jazz, and a lot of hip-hop people just listen to hip-hop, and there's not a lot of crossover, unfortunately.

It is spectacular to watch an erupting volcano

Life is a school, be opened to learn from it, but sometimes it might teach you through the hard way

She was like the Sun. At just the right distance, she gave me life, but if I got too close, she would burn me.

There are a number of steps that we can take to reinvigorate and rebuild the economic and the physical infrastructure of our country and then to rebuild us, frankly, on a spiritual level.

Change the world. Build a business. Have fun.

There must be nothing in my daily conduct that, copied by another, could lead that one into unholiness.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...

Most people are dead. Hitler. Ray Charles. Some other guys. But mostly those two.

Literature provides us with experiences it would not be wise or possible to introduce into our own world and thus enlarges our understanding of the world.

He's pulling the load of an ox and walking on eggshells.