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.

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.

Silence will speakIf given an ear

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous may happen.

My Brain and My Heart are my Temples. My true Religion is Kindness.

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.

Each story we approach in the same way, with curiosity and interest and determination to get behind the image.

How much to learn if we could spend one hour, spend twenty minutes, with the us we will become! How much could we say to the us we were.

Business logic and musical logic are utterly incompatible.

Many health care providers, particularly physicians in rural and urban areas, are leaving the Government programs because of inadequate reimbursement rates.

We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility

Without dreams, there can be no courage. And without courage, there can be no action.