When I started studying for the arias it was like going into training for a heavyweight title fight.

I love songwriting. It's second to my love for singing in how I express myself.

Sinatra, here's a guy who plays a tough guy in all his movies, but was allowed to be vulnerable when he stepped up to the microphone.

Whoever best serves the song is going to be served by the song.

For years I've kept a list of dream projects.

It's understanding the intention of a composer that allows a producer and an arranger to make those moments speak.

You're presuming too much by using the word legacy - presuming that someone is going to care.

We used to call it recurrent airplay when someone had a hit.

Black music has increased my enjoyment of what I do. It has increased my range, my ability to reach into myself and accept myself.

A lot of my success comes from black music. It's something I'm very proud of.

There are certain people who have become better artists, but they're brilliant at marketing. I think someone who's been phenomenal like that is Madonna.

You can't make everybody love what you do, but you can know how great you feel doing it.

It's a combination of melody and lyrics, not one without the other. It's a confluence of these different elements that makes something powerful.

I have friends who've tried to break into the UK, who went back with their tails between their legs. Fortunately I've had the opposite experience.

No matter how great we get with digital formats of instrumentation, nothing really quite duplicates the real thing.

Dr. King is so inspiring, so impressive, so moving as a human being.

I'm proud of my mentors. Ray Charles is the strongest influence on me as a singer.

The Top 40 is geared toward 20 and under, not 20 and up. That's the audience I'm geared to.

The whole industry evolves around a great song.

To sing along with Stevie Wonder, you had to make your voice do things it was not accustomed to doing.

I was blown away by the control and the range that I was hearing. I'm listening to Pavarotti and thinking, What the hell have I been doing with my voice all these years?

It's an important thing to remember where you came from.

When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.

When I started studying for the arias it was like going into training for a heavyweight title fight.

A lot of the greatest compositions were made famous by Sinatra.

I have to be happy in the here and now because every time you start focusing on your legacy you're really setting yourself up for disappointment.

With the internet, things are so much more immediate. People taste-test things to see if they want to buy the CD.

The bigger you are, the harder they come down on you.

I kept looking to do songs that were written years ago and would live or outlive all of us, and the one thing they had in common was Sinatra.

When I was invited to sing with Pavarotti, I had about two weeks to learn Italian.

Someone told me there was a publisher that could find a good home for my songs, but I didn't want to give up my pursuit of a career in the business as an artist.

Considering the amount of information we're bombarded by, it's amazing if a song can transcend time.

One song will launch you, but you don't want to be a one-song artist.

On singing in the swimming pool: "If I can move the water, I can move the people."

Fight the good fight of faith, and God will give you spiritual mercies.

As a nation we should commit ourselves not only to the fight against terrorism, but to economic justice, defeat of the AIDS epidemic and vestiges of discriminatory policies of all kinds.

It's a very hard and competitive business in which you have to fight every day in order to impose yourself.

Especially today as we fight the war on terror - against an enemy that represents hatred, extremism and stands behind no flag - we need to remember the sacrifices that have gone into protecting our flag.

The people themselves, and only the people, determine the rhythm of our fight.

I hated Chris, my brother. I would pull his hair and kick him, until one day my father gave him permission to fight back. I'll be apologizing to him for the rest of my life.

Even though the outcome wasn't the way it should have been, publicly I still feel in my heart I won the Sugar Ray Leonard fight.

But on the other hand, in the midst of the chaos, you find normal people. You find people who are willing to risk their lives to tell you what they saw, even though they have no dog in the fight.

There are two things that I put my focus on. One is the fight against AIDS and finding a cure. The other is human rights.

We in this Congress have a choice. The American people have a right to exercise a choice on this issue, as to whether our men and women will continue to fight and die in a war based on deception and fantasy, or to start bringing the troops home.

We must provide all kinds of freedom, personal and economic, to all Iraqis. I will fight for that.

I don't like guys who will lie down and take it. I want someone who'll fight back. I like people who can argue well.

When I fight someone, I want to break his will. I want to take his manhood. I want to rip out his heart and show it to him.

The liberation movement which I led in Algeria, the organization that I created to fight the French army, was at first a small movement of nothing at all. We were but some tens of people throughout Algeria, a territory that is five times the size of France.

I feel like I'm a fighter. I've fought my whole life to get to where I'm at. I like fight movies. When someone gets knocked down, I like to root for him to succeed.