Alanis Morissette

I was born in ’74, so I missed out on all the great early ’60s and early ’70s.

At some point, I would like to write a book and other things, but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.

As a teen, I was both anorexic and bulimic.

The thing I always default to is that I’ll always be here to write songs.

I was motivated by just thinking that if you had all this external success that everyone would love you and everything would be peaceful and wonderful.

I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.

My music is Jazz.

I developed in my head that I’m never any better than my last concert or the last time I played, so it’s like an audition each time. You get nervous just before going onstage. I still have that, but I think it’s more like concern. You’re concerned about the people – like meeting your in-laws for the first time.

It is Jazz’s very nature to change, to develop and adapt to the circumstances of its environment.

Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

I just fell in love with the integrity of the music and that was it.

I’m always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.

No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.

Jazz standards are our contribution to music history.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player.

Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.

Something just grabs you about a song.

What a fool I am to think my breaking heart could kid the moon.

I’ll keep evolving and put that into my songs.

I’m creating music – it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it.