My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.

I'm not a jazz singer.

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

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 was a guitar player first off.

I feel fortunate that I was able to step away from it when I wasn't interested.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.

I love all kinds of music.

A lot of what I have always done is do other singers.

From the time I moved to San Francisco in 1967 to play with the Steve Miller Band, there was a lot of support in the music community for one cause or another, but this one was special because it was put on by people who understood where musicians' hearts are.

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

I think that it can be said of a lot of artists, and myself included, that we made the same record over and over from the beginning.

Quite frankly, I've always listened to the black side of the radio dial. Where I grew up, there was a lot of it and there was a lot of live music around.

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.

The short answer is, yes, I think I have become a better singer.

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

This is a cause that musicians can take to heart because one of our main reasons for being is to share our music with other people, and this takes us to people who probably wouldn't otherwise get to hear music on quite this level.

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

I felt that, in retrospect, there was a time in the late Seventies, after I had a string of hits and successes, as a performer and a recording artist, that I wasn't saying anything.

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

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.

I would say that I'm finding my voice in more ways than one.

There is not a lot that keeps me glued to the radio as I used to be.

My first love was the sound of guitar.

I really just followed my musical instincts every step of my life.

There's a whole lot of songs that men just can't do. The words are from another time and represent too much of an emotional commitment, whereas women can say that because of who they are.

Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has plenty not on your past misfortunes of which all men have some.

Have you ever noticed how nice people are at the car wash?! Maybe it's just me, but it makes me happy. Weird, I know!

I like books that are exciting and that make you think about things as well.

People see I am a mother and head of a household. Today in Chile, one-third of households are run by women. They wake up, take the children to school, go to work. To them I am hope.

Stay single until someone actually complements your life in a way that makes it better to not be single. If not, it's not worth it.

Writing a book is very personal. It's a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters.

Here in Florida we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland...the blessing of size. Theres enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine.

'Ikiru' is existential but with a lot of tenderness.

But I'm not an idiot. At the end of the day, I've learned a lot.

I get weepy even watching the news.

If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.'

For being different its easy. But to be unique its a complicated thing.

Miley Cyrus, like all of us, needs to be loved. We all come from complicated parents... I understand her, and I love her, and I think things will be different with her. But you know, in the music business, sometimes you have to shock a little.

I think it's better to have your personal life and your work life separate. That way they don't corrupt each other, so to speak.

The dullest Olympic sport is curling, whatever 'curling' means.

I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.

If I was a bad character that got away with murder like we see on other shows, I do not think I would like it because that sends a message that you can do these horrible things and never pay for it.

What is consciousness? Our brain simulates reality. So, our everyday experiences are a form of dreaming, which is to say, they are mental models, simulations, not the things they appear to be.

When you join the NFL, you start from scratch. As long as I've been playing - which has been since I was eight years old - the game becomes harder at every level. Little league, high school, college - they're different stages you have to go through, and professional sport is completely different again.

I think people should be proud of the work they do, whatever it is. I have this other arty side that loves creating homes. I can be happy going to the hardware store.

He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.