I feel like music is oceanic - there's no end to what you can discover.

If you're doing something new there is always a sense of fear or foreboding, but you're in new ground and you have to get out your machete and cut a new path.

The people who are going into music who hunger, they're going into pop music. There are some badass women who are ambitious and hungry and brave, and they're in pop.

I write to find out about how the world sings.

I'd been trained as a classical musician, but also as a pop musician. My teacher made sure that everything was available.

My daughter is my greatest gift and, not to be corny, but my greatest teacher.

I have never relied on anyone else for money since I graduated, and that made me feel grown up.

My early life was full of music because my sisters played the piano and I started playing at three.

I think there are some things in music that work and don't work. That's learned from counterpoint and rhythm and theory, and they don't work if you don't want them to work.

Believe you can and you will.

The ancient teaching of Tao tells us that knowing what you really are is wisdom, and living it is virtue.

My most powerful memory was hearing Earl Scruggs on 'The Beverly Hillbillies' as a 5 or 6 year old. That sound just blew me away, shook my head up.

The mechanics of putting one spot of color next to another, that is the fundamental thing.

Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.

Because I was big, I didn't have to listen to anyone doubting me. I was just considered good at football or whatever, there were no questions about it.

You know that a plan was dreamed up by politicians and pollsters - and not by, oh, anyone who knows what they are talking about - when the numbers are nice and round with a catchy ring to them.

Deep frying a Twinkie makes it healthy, right?

The 'person' is not an interchangeable part. The 'citizen' is. ... The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It's what the hippies were.

I'm very budget-minded myself, and it serves me well.