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.

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.

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.

If you don't know when you're good, how can you know when you're bad?

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.

You put a song on the record or on tape and you stop singing it. You just don't sit around and sing it anymore unless you're performing. That's kind of sad.

Too many think lightly of sin, and therefore think lightly of the Savior.

If I went to someone for therapy, I wouldn't be a writer...I would just be well adjusted.

Man ... has an inborn religious sentiment that whispers of a God to his inmost soul, as a shell taken from the deep yet echoes forever the ocean's roar.

All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.

Looks, health and elegance are what counts. Someone can look wonderful in a sweatsuit.

I started skating because I loved it. I started when I was three and I didn't know all the sacrifices and all the hardships and how difficult day-in and day-out it would be.

The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas.