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

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.

Among absent lovers, ardor always fares better.

French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.

I have considered rap music stars, and there is one in my new book, Lovers and Players, and there is also a hip-hop music mogul who I think you will like a lot.

The quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love.

I had previously been in the band the Modern Lovers with Jonathan Richman.

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'

Eventually you love people - friends or lovers - because of their flaws.

The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.

The reason that lovers never weary each other is because they are always talking about themselves.

When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

The love story for me was the nature of the love and not the age of the lovers.

We Greeks are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.

Lovers have a right to betray you... friends don't.

Women who have had no lovers, or having had one, two or three, have not found a husband, have perhaps rather had a miss than a loss, as men go.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.

It's impossible to compare two bands. It would be like comparing two lovers.

All great lovers are articulate, and verbal seduction is the surest road to actual seduction.