I do everything in the third person. Performance is about being someone else.

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.

One swallow alone does not make the summer.

I became a degenerate artist. My parents were shaped by their own experiences, and artists weren't so useful in the death camps.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

Nobody can do as much damage to the church of God as the man who is within its walls, but not within its life.

Theres nothing to fear but fears themselves, such as monsters, rejection, food poisoning, redundancy, monsters, and oxford commas.

Computers allow architects to remain parental instead of being marginalized by the contractors and managers.

Suffering is how we test our love especially our love for God.

The only way to save the world is through socialism, but a socialism that exists within a democracy; there's no dictatorship here.

Why are they called a-part-ments, when they're all stuck together?

The true joy of a moonlit night is something we no longer understand. Only the men of old, when there were no lights, could understand the true joy of a moonlit night.