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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Patience is a power unto itself.

They’d have people out looking for her, and nothing makes grown-ups quite so mad as finding a child safe when they’d been scared silly that they might find that child dead.

Mothers observe all, absorb all, give all, forgive all, offer all, suffer all, feel all, heal all, hope for all, pray for all.But most o

Has any non-dipshit man ever used the word "ladies" not followed by the word "room"?

Adjusted for inflation, somebody going to college today to a state university, is paying about 300 percent of what her mom or dad did just 30 years ago.

Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy.

Being converted to Jesus is learning to so adore God that we would gladly renounce everything we have to follow Him.

I'm so exhausted and yet I feel like I'll never sleep again.

Plato once wanted to punish one of his slaves and asked his nephew to do the actual whipping for he himself did not own his anger.