You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.

Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.

As long as we keep searching, the answers come.

It sounds corny, but it's absolutely true: A song chooses me. I don't go looking for a certain kind of lyric. It kind of develops its own little arc and I'll just see what happens.

In other words, it is what I do in the world that matters. When I traveled for three months in the Mideast, the places I wanted to go back to were Turkey and the Gaza Strip. It has to do with what Gandhi said: he found God in the eyes of the poor. Those are the places which were so moving that they were just unbearable.

It [my vocal] didn't sound like what I wanted to hear; the vibrato isn't what I liked anymore. So I got myself to an ear, nose and throat guy who does a lot of work with singers, and I was hoping there was a big wart on my vocal cords or something and they could scrape it off and I could have the voice I wanted. But he said, "No, for 71, that's your voice."