There ain't no doubt in my mind that love is the finest thing around

There'll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done.

I'm often surprised by classical music and musicians. I've met a large number of them because my wife works for the Boston Symphony, and I'm in that world a lot now. I'm surprised at how difficult it is for people who are classically trained to read music or to memorize music, how difficult it is for them to improvise, to just go off and play. It's sort of, it's like terra incognita. They just, (makes noise) they don't get it.

I'm glad that I still have the ability to tour in Europe. I do love it.

It's probably foolish to expect relationships to go on forever and to say that because something only lasts 10 years, it's a failure.

I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about Black music, about soul music.

There's a lot more information at hand and sometimes there's information overload and we become desensitized to it, so things start to mean less.