Some songs are just like tattoos for your brain... you hear them and they're affixed to you.

Your wrinkles either show that you're nasty, cranky, and senile, or that you're always smiling.

The worst thing you can become in life is cynical. Cynical is like concrete. and nothing grows in concrete.

I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.

My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.

All music is important if it comes from the heart.

You're always cursing, you're always praying and you're always making love. It ain't do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do.