When you're playing live, those people who you're trying to please and reach, they're right there giving you feedback. And you don't get that feedback in the studio.

My music is homegrown from the garden of New Orleans. Music is everything to me short of breathing. Music also has a role to lift you up - not to be escapist but to take you out of misery.

And do respect the women of the world; remember you all had mothers.

As a young child, I thought that all pianists played everything. I mean, I thought anything on piano - any piano music, all pianists played it.

As an early child, I tried to play every kind of music that I heard. I thought everyone was doing that.

To play with a band all of the time, just about nightly, was good for me because I wrote lots of arrangements and I got a lot of my transposition and chords ironed out.

To travel and to get around different places, especially in station wagons, you could really see America.

I never planned on being a live performer. My whole forte was about being in the studio, producing, playing the piano on recording sessions. I was all about the studio.

Whenever I wrote songs - particularly back then - it would always be for a particular artist.

The mother-in-laws themselves weren't natural jokes but most comedians used to use that.

Home is everything you can walk to.

Stand in your own two shoes.

For him, the kampung was a place to live and work that was based on a steadfast and intimate relationship between man and nature. The village was a true reflection of life in the tropics.

Every fictioneer re-invents the world because the facts, things or people of the received world are unacceptable.

Uncomfortable doesn't mean bad, uncomfortable simply means you're doing something you haven't done before.

I see a good marriage as being like two tall trees growing beside each other, each nourishing the grace of the other.

Books have been to me what gold is to the miser, what new fields are to the explorer.

If Shane Warne were to become England spin bowling coach I think it would be fantastic for myself and all those learning to bowl spin in England.

Televisions are devices with screens that things appear on.

It is not a sensible or intelligent response for us in Europe to ridicule American arguments and parody their political leadership.