A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

I've gone the full spectrum - from gospel to blues to jazz to soul to pop - and the public has accepted what I've done through it all. I think it means I've been doing something right at the right time.

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

I might have lived long enough to learn all this in the long haul, but I would have been just another soul taking up time and space for a long spell before I learned.

Music is the greatest communication in the world. Even if people don't understand the language that you're singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.

Like an echo from a ruined castle prayer is an echo from the ruined human soul of the sweet promise of God.

A truly moral health care system should start out by covering all of its citizens with basic health care. It would not be seduced by its technology and fancy buildings.

I have been on the same dose of anti-depressants for 15 years, and my nerves still go up and down in cycles; but my nerves are cycling at a lower level than they were before.

I'm somewhat in my own cloud.

The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.

When facing the public, politicians constantly filter their ideas through a political sieve. 'How will this affect the environmentalists, labor, management?' Sometimes the sieve gets so clogged by political taboos that no new ideas pass through.

A good comedy with a purpose behind it is exhilarating.

I wasn't a dancer learning to play Baby Houseman. I was Baby Houseman learning to play a dancer. I was someone who'd never done any Latin dance. I'd taken jazz classes and ballet growing up in New York, so I had dance in me, and I knew I loved it, but I'd never done a dance audition.

Quality not quantity.

Not everybody in the country-music community is like me - I just happen to be one of the guys that is stereotypical.

Journalists cover words and delude themselves into thinking they have committed journalism.

Everyone who knows me knows that I don't have a prejudiced bone in my body.

I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me want to be a journalist - I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a plot and then filling in the research.

It was jolly in the country. A cow and little pigs to play with and milk warm from the cow.

Officers are taught to use all the tricks and lies that courts permit within the scope of the Fifth Amendment's shield against self-incrimination.

For me, Jersey represents going through what you can go through and still surviving. That's the cool thing about people from the Tri-State area. We're fighters. We're survivors, and we're edgier than anyone else on Earth.

I don't care how much it costs or who it's by as long as it fits me. I love shopping, but I go to the same stores I've always gone to: Guess, Bebe, Coach. I can't really skip out of that realm.

I won't watch that Amir fight from now until I fight Alvarez. I'm not a blown up 147 or a Miguel Cotto. I'm a big 154 lb., and I'm coming of age and coming to win.

In love, women are professionals, men are amateurs.

I have a sneaking suspicion that all religions lead to the same place, a very unified place.

The same myths are told in every culture, and they might swap out details, but it's still the same story. It's the same story, but with a different face.

I don't have any sentimental notion about how people are going to remember me.