Alanis Morissette

I love songs that are very autobiographical.

I saw music as a way to entertain people and take them away from their daily lives and put smiles on their faces, as opposed to what I see it being now, which is a way for me to actually communicate, and a way for me to tap into my subconscious.

Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.

What’s that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I’m able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I’m older. Thank God for growing up.

Making a movie requires 20 to 500 people to make and a lot of money and the stakes are a lot higher.

I am what I am Are you what you are or What?

No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.

Too many young musicians today want to win polls before they learn their instruments.

I hate to think of Jazz as black and white, something political.

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn’s 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn’s 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.

I don’t really get nervous, I prepare. When the music messed up in the beginning, it tapped into my nerves and when you’re nervous and vulnerable, something special and something different can happen.

We might as well swing boys, because Stravinsky cuts us all.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won’t come out.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

I felt a responsibility to present a viable alternative to the popular electric sound.

You have a mentor or teacher and you learn all he can show you.

Music is born out of the inner sounds within a soul.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.