If you look at the other singers of Billie Holiday's time, they were really trying to entertain. They were trying to make people feel good. They were singing fast - and she was singing the blues.

All my stuff is pretty seamless - like now, while I'm touring [Yesterday I Sang The Blues], today I'm going to go in the studio, I'm writing my next one. For me it's continual.

I don't get writer's block. I don't try to write anything; when something comes, I write it. I just practice and when I get an idea I write it down.

I really like the complexity of jazz, the emotional depth; I feel like there's no other music that's really as satisfying as jazz.

When I start working on a new album, I kind of stop listening to a lot of outside stuff just so I can kind of focus.

I love that [ late-50s Verve recordings] - to me, that's the epitome of vocal jazz. It's my favorite style and era of it.

I'm pretty much always planning two albums ahead.

[Billie Holiday] was keeping it super real, and you can feel that to this day. Everything that she sang, she believed in. So I had to pick songs that I felt the same about.

For me, the difference between a musician reading an arrangement on a piece of paper, and them closing their eyes and listening to what's happening around them and responding to it, is huge.

When I sort of step in my jazz world, it's somewhere between instrumental jazz and vocal jazz.

Kind of the sad thing is that - it's still true - a lot of jazz people just listen to jazz, and a lot of hip-hop people just listen to hip-hop, and there's not a lot of crossover, unfortunately.

Hope-it was a fire that lit the soul, a belief in both the impossible and in everything imaginable, the budding anticipation of joy, waiting with each breath.

Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future.

The golden door of harvest for the planet, it felt so ready to be opened ...

It's inevitable that you will die, so the only question is when. The great thrillers are the moments that play and tease with the question, "When will it be?"

Monuments! what are they? the very pyramids have forgotten their builders, or to whom they were dedicated. Deeds, not stones, are the true monuments of the great.

Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.

Painting is neither decorative amusement, nor the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

How can I describe how much I love you? Is it even possible to describe a love like that? I don’t know, but as I sit here with pen in hand, I know that I have to try.

I pulled the Johnny character from the Jamaican Johnny Too Bad thing.

Standards should not be forced down from above but rather set by the production workers themselves.