Whenever I wrote songs - particularly back then - it would always be for a particular artist.

My music is homegrown from the garden of New Orleans. Music is everything to me short of breathing. Music also has a role to lift you up - not to be escapist but to take you out of misery.

And do respect the women of the world; remember you all had mothers.

As a young child, I thought that all pianists played everything. I mean, I thought anything on piano - any piano music, all pianists played it.

As an early child, I tried to play every kind of music that I heard. I thought everyone was doing that.

To play with a band all of the time, just about nightly, was good for me because I wrote lots of arrangements and I got a lot of my transposition and chords ironed out.

When you're playing live, those people who you're trying to please and reach, they're right there giving you feedback. And you don't get that feedback in the studio.

To travel and to get around different places, especially in station wagons, you could really see America.

I never planned on being a live performer. My whole forte was about being in the studio, producing, playing the piano on recording sessions. I was all about the studio.

The mother-in-laws themselves weren't natural jokes but most comedians used to use that.

What you love is longing for you.

Life is always better with God on the lead.

Naomi knew she should pray... Instead, she put her face in her hands and wept with all the force of a bursting dam.

I'm a quite serious actor who doesn't mind being ridiculously comic.

A cat cares for you only as a source of food, security and a place in the sun.

Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.

He has sat on the fence so long that the iron has entered his soul.

I can express no better hope for my country than that the kind Providence which smiled upon our fathers may enable their children to preserve the blessings they have inherited.

The worst is likely to be behind us.

It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.