The thing that influenced me most was the way Tommy played his trombone. It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or violin-not sounding like them, but "playing" the voice like those instrumentalists.

Fear is the enemy of logic. There is no more debilitating, crushing, self-defeating, sickening thing in the world--to an individual or to a nation.

[Answering the phone] Hello, this is a recording, you've dialed the right number, now hang up and don't do it again.

What I do with my life is of my own doing. I live it the best way I can.

Nothing anybody's said or written about me ever bothers me, except when it does.

To me religion is a deeply personal thing in which man and God go it alone together, without the witch doctor in the middle. The witch doctor tries to convince us that we have to ask God for help, to spell out to him what we need, even to bribe him with prayer or cash on the line.

I don't know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics, but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation.