“I found that if I sang a line using the consonants, vowels, shadings, and inflection we recognize as human language sounds, people responded as if I were talking to them.”

You can try a new way of singing a song you’ve performed for years, a new way of showing your family your love for them, or a new recipe.

I want them to have this sense of real, real joy from the depths of their being. Because I think when you take them to that place, then you open up a place where grace can come in.

Improvisation is the courage to move from one note to the next.

And you realise you’re doing a public service in making people happy – as a musician you can give people something a doctor, a lawyer, a politician cannot give them that. It’s not scientific.

It’s not that I don’t love the song. My songs are like my children: some you want around and some you want to send off to college as soon as possible.

Whenever I’m onstage, I try my best not to think that I’m performing. It’s simply another part of my day.

My father was a very disciplined singer who worked hard at his craft, and I was around that growing up.

When we listen to improvisational jazz, or solo classical violinists, the way they phrase and inflect melodies feels vocal, like they’re talking to us.

Each of us might give that phrase a different meaning. It’s open to interpretation, and one song becomes a thousand songs. I love that.

Remembering that life can be full of surprises is useful in any part of your life.

I actually fought the idea for a while because it seemed almost too radical, but it became obvious what I was supposed to be doing.

Here’s a little song I wrote. You might want to sing it note for note. Don’t worry, be happy.

The true musician is to bring light into people’s hearts.

The voice gets to the soul of a person more than any other instrument. Because it’s the voice. It sings talks, it cries, it laughs, it squeals, it barks, it shouts it whispers, There is no other instrument that can do that. We’re born with it.

Don’t use the language of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when talking about blood sugar numbers

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.

Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.

But I think people, especially white people, have to come to understand that the language of the ghetto is a language of its own, and as the party – whose members for the most part come from the ghetto – seeks to talk to the people, it must speak the people’s language.

Speak the language of the person you want to become.

Gore speaks to America as if English is its second language; George W. speaks as if English is his second language.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.