I'm easily distracted by other things in the world around me.

I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.

My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.

My first love was the sound of guitar.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I'm not a jazz singer.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

You’re an immortal, divine being. A little god, and yet, you toil like a slave. Isn’t that hilarious?

Focus on what's next, not what came before.

I had a couple of decent laughs on Townies, but for the most part, delivering a joke that you just know is not funny is hard.

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

I think that’s the lesson you learn in life. As you get older you realize you’re never going to grow up and you’re never going to be ready. And you may, as well, do things now, don’t wait

Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.

I've made a profit from everything I have done in life.

Married and unmarried women waste a great deal of time in feeling sorry for each other.

The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.