Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like many different things you know so I'm probably going to experiment, and if I didn't I'd be a little bit strange and boring and stiff and kind of dead, and I'm very not that.
I'm a horrible control freak. It's awful! I'm nice, but if someone is folding some sheets while I am playing the guitar, I keep one eye on the way that they are folding the sheets.
Britney and I wore matching denim outfits [to the 2001 American Music Awards]. Yeah, another bad choice. I'd probably pay good money to get some of those pictures off the internet.
My idol when I was growing up was Michael Jordan the basketball player because of his work ethic rather than his talent and because of what he went through to be as good as he was.
We did 10 years of working and travelling constantly, and we were just knackered. I thought: 'I've got to take a break.' I felt like I was going mad. I decided to move to Cornwall.
My uncle was in a ska band called the Top Cats; that was my first proper influence, as I was taken to see them every week. It sort of built up, the want to replicate it creatively.
I definitely have relapses of stress. Most human beings are like that. But I think, ultimately, music is a therapeutic situation. Once you start playing, it all just gets resolved.
If youve ever lived in Chicago, anyone who has, they know what a winter in Chicago is like. To be going through a tough time here in the winter would be just be all the more worse.
Nobody heard records of you playing whatever the melody was on those low strings. It worked out good, you know, about 25 or 26 million records later. I guess it worked out alright.
Why is it that I notice so many brilliant scientists using Macs for their personal computers; why does the Lawrence Livermore & Berkeley Labs buy millions of dollars worth of Macs?
When I'm making my music, I'm writing it, I'm producing it, I'm playing all the instruments, I'm performing. It's my own world where I do what I feel, and nobody tells me anything.
I've always wanted to sing and to be an entertainer. After high school, I moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles and started songwriting. But I didn't really get serious until then.
Start saving your pennies now. People spend $300 on crazy things all the time, things like handbags. So work all year, scrape the money together, and come to my show. I’m worth it.
Usually when you do shows you're in the middle of the tour and you're all oiled up and it's just another stop. It's so much pressure for just three minutes. My stomach still hurts.
Marvin's Motivational Moments actually started as something that was actually therapeutic for me. I would sit up late at night after my wife passed trying to adjust to being alone.
If I write for beauty and truth, the songs will find their way to me. Then, it's the songs that speak to the audience, and they can become part of the tribe that is into what I do.
I remember a time when all my fans were crying and sad and going through hell. Now, we're trying to uplift each other and accept ourselves for who we are, even if nobody else does.
I believed in Obama for social issues. I believe he brought our nation together and healed our racial divide. Martin Luther King's dream came true when he was elected. That's huge.
I stopped beating up on myself. I stopped asking myself why I didn't sell this number of records, why I don't have corporate sponsorship. I just don't buy into any of that anymore.
We have to heal our wounded world. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment.
I find in animals the same thing I find so wonderful in children. That purity, that honesty, where they don't judge you, they just want to be your friend. I think that is so sweet.
So I'm leaving Sony, a free agent, owning half of Sony. I own half of Sony's Publishing. I'm leaving them, and they're very angry at me, because I just did good business, you know.
It’s perfectly natural for me to sit down and talk about meditating and spiritual practice with my friends. But then I realize, how would it sound to a drunk cynical guy in London?
This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don’t drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.
I feel like you should always be questioning the genre you're doing. If you're doing something that sounds like a lullaby, it can be good to make it about someone stalking someone.
When I found out I was pregnant, my mother said, 'Dont separate your life, the life that youre going to make with this child, from the things that you are and what you want to do.'
I listened to a lot of female pop music growing up. I started to realize that there were women out there wanting to stay something, playing instruments and writing their own songs.
I never want people to know who I'm going out with or about my family. But it's difficult, because when people have seen you online since you were 14, they feel like they know you.
In college I had a weekend gig at a restaurant, a solo thing that was the best practice I could have ever had. That's where I learned to coordinate my singing and my piano playing.
I try not to give too much advice, really, because people have to do their things their way. I got lots of advice when I was young, and I ignored most of it - the good and the bad.
Any quick analysis of a Beatles tune or a Cole Porter tune will reveal often simple but unexpected chords, chords that chromatically shift between keys, or between major and minor.
Still, it's clear that there are lots of people out there who are uncomfortable [about racism]. The Civil War was a long time ago but there are aspects of it that remain unsettled.
Watching Princess walking down the aisle... when I heard the music and I saw her come down, I lost it. I was like, I'm just gonna let it go and enjoy the love and positive emotion.
A faith that moves mountains is a faith that expands horizons, it does not bring us into a smaller world full of easy answers, but into a larger one where there is room for wonder.
Like with acting, if you're charming or just good-looking, you might be able to get your foot in the door. But a lot of time with music, you actually have to kinda be able to sing.
I'll tell you what I love. Sending back bottles of wine that aren't right in restaurants in France! Whoa! I love the French, but I do find their wine snobbery something unbearable.
I found my style in my aunt's attic. She hoarded all her '60s clothes there, along with the tiaras she'd won as a beauty queen, and I'd steal her wedding dress to wear around town.
Writing for yourself is like exposing your diary. It can be a little embarrassing at times, but if it helps somebody get through the day just by hearing a song, it's well worth it.
I'm a multi-faceted woman and person, like all women are - there's no black and white. We have shades of grey in the middle. And even many more colours that other people don't see!
I feel like I'm on top of the world. Honestly, I feel like I've climbed a very giant mountain, and I'm just standing right on top with my arms wide open and breathing rarified air.
You don't have to wait for a record company to tell you that you're good or to sign you. You can put your music out on itunes, youtube, soundcloud, so it's kind of a plus, I think.
I was in musicals. and I was in the choir when I was younger. Before I started writing my own songs, I thought I wanted to be on Broadway, but it was nothing I ever really pursued.
I was an average student. I wasn't any standout. I remember when people started to know who I was and the label offers, people started to get a little weird and be weird around me.
A lot of people come up to me expecting to meet the person they have seen perform. It's not going to happen, unless my mania, my stage person, responds to them and not the real me.
I love the Holy Spirit. I can't stand to see it being disrespected. It's been there for me at times when I really needed it. Therefore, I have a duty to stand for it is how I feel.
What I really resent most about people sticking labels on you is that it cuts off all the other elements of what you are because it can only deal with black and white; the cartoon.
I wear whatever makes me comfortable on stage, so that I feel confident. Some days it's a plaid skirt with a button-up and other days it's jeans with a hockey jersey and platforms.
Sometimes you make a record that is what you want to hear. I've made a couple of those, idealized creations of what I wanted to hear. Then there are records that are what you feel.
It's not like making records is terrible. Still, I do find the writing of the songs and the live shows to be the things that give you the most clear picture of what it's all about.
I am in a business that's built on record sales and reputation and how your single is doing and where your song is on iTunes. But the kind of music that I do comes from my beliefs.