I love Christmas! I'm not religious, but I love the trappings of the season. I love the decorations, and the music, and Santa, and the festive food, and the cinnamon- and vanilla-infused aromas.

Actually, the first thing I do is choose the antique that will be featured in each book. I try to find unusual objects with great stories. I am fascinated by the stories.

I encourage people to read by encouraging them to read whatever they want.

The trick is to get people to read anything, to engender the love of reading. Once you can read, you can teach yourself anything. Librarians are key, I think. They hold the power to empower.

While the cast of characters stays the same, I always try to add in new information so readers get to know the people they care about better with each story.

While I hear from readers all the time that they love learning new things, I never want to do an "info-dump." Boring! I try to include enticing details and skip all the rest.

The key is to silence the mind long enough to tune into the intuition of the heart.

Not every one of us are born or made free of our own prisons to the extent of ourselves.

I stone got crazy when I saw somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn.

Terrorism takes us back to ages we thought were long gone if we allow it a free hand to corrupt democratic societies and destroy the basic rules of international life.

I don't belong in limos or private jets or on stage with people cheering me but that's what's kept me grounded because I know it's not right.

Despite all the technical improvements, it still boils down to a man or a woman and a microphone, playing music, sharing stories, talking about issues -- communicating with an audience.

I think I'm known as a liberal democrat and Hispanic and a practicing Catholic, but I never really went out of my way specifically to play a president or any kind of leader.

Love should have no alternatives; love should be the sole reason for loving; love should spring of itself.

Achieve some perfection [excellence] yourself, so that you may not fall into sorrow by seeing the perfection in others.

It may be that my most helpful contributions to music aren't my compact discs but my articles about other great singers of the past for American Heritage magazine.