I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that's required to sound like jazz. For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.'

If all you have is music, then you don't have music

The arts can open the door to the imagination, pushing the envelope of how peace can be created. It takes courage to take this kind of risk, and courage is what we all need to create a better world.

Music is interior decoration.

Go out on the stage as a human being and do not be afraid to show struggle in your music. It's a struggle in life and then struggle and then victory.

No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?

Composing is improvisation slowed down.

You're like the girl who left her shadow in the drawer, but when she went to get it, it wasn't there.

Your humanity is your instrument.

To hell with the rules. I'm going for the unknown.

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap.

The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed.

Well, I'm from the South originally. I grew up in South Carolina definitely learning about manners and being proper and having to go to cotillions.

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.

An effective way to test code is to exercise it at its natural boundaries

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.

A woman is a hunter without a forest.

I got into music when I was 12, 13.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.