Its all about finding the right note at the right place and knowing when to leave well enough alone. And that's a lifelong quest.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized and there's just no outlet, there's no venue for it, in terms of media.

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

Music is just kind of an expression of who I am. It's what I do.

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.

I tend to play in a way that feels natural to me. To me that's authentic for myself. I play by where I'm led by some sense of where I feel I'm supposed to be.

When I make records, I never listen to stuff after it's done. Ever.

Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.

To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.

I'll just sit at the piano a lot an play like through different chord exercises and kind of just throwing my hands down on the piano from one chord to the next to see what happens.

A 'no' does not hide anything, but a 'yes' very easily becomes a deception.

What is the most important thing in your life?For me, it is my freedom of mind, my freedom to choose my own ways of self-construction or self-destruction.

They were all brilliant. They wrote books and painted pictures, and if they ever stopped talking, which I was sure they would never do, they planned to change the world.

Governments throughout the English-speaking sphere are creating and then ratcheting the torque on "hate-speech" laws with frightening eagerness.

Everything is always decided for reasons other than the real merits of the case

I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.

There was no blueprint or how-to manual for fixing a global financial meltdown, an auto crisis, two wars and a great recession, all at the same time.

You can't measure a man by his size. You measure him by the fight he has inside.

A bank book makes good reading - better than some novels.

When I do not understand, I like to say nothing.