I cannot imagine a more satisfying calling than my own: beauty, humanity, and history every day, combined with the cathartic joy of singing.

When a human being without amplification makes a sound that is high and loud, it is almost unworldly.

Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.

We are unique, each human voice, not because we are completely self-generated, but because of who we choose to assemble the countless factors that made us.

We sing with the entire body. The sounds that we make emanate not just from the head, but from the whole heart and soul, and, most important, the gut.

I don't want to be somebody who stands still and sings pretty. Each song is a world. Each song is a story. I don't achieve nearly what I want.

Everybody's a work in progress. I'm a work in progress. I mean, I've never arrived. I'm still learning all the time.

There's no performance where I never have to think about setting up a phrase or making a technical adjustment while I'm performing.

Someone once said that there are probably seven naturally good singing days in a year-and those are days you won't be booked. What we must learn is how to sing through all the other days.

It is our responsibility to learn how to speak to an audience that is less informed about music, to give it a reason to want to come and see us instead of going to the movies.

I don't want to record anything unless it can be great and genuinely interesting.

...we fear monsters because we fear the dark parts of ourselves...

They were two people staring at each other knowingly, communicating psychically amidst an ocean of deaf, dumb and blind meatsacks.

Facts must be faced. Vegetables simply don't taste as good as most other things do.

To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.

[On an actor who'd broken her leg in London:] Oh, how terrible. She must have done it sliding down a barrister.

I have some sarcastic sides of me.

No amount of promises can guarantee love

My palate is simpler than it used to be. A young chef adds and adds and adds to the plate. As you get older, you start to take away.

if we begin on the men, there is no stopping. We must love them when we can.

Life is supposed to get tough.