Diana Krall

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.

I’ve sung a lot of emotional songs, but when you’re writing it’s very difficult to decide what to reveal.

I’m not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I’d rather be figured out.

Love songs last because they are about feelings that don’t change.

You want the listener to find the song on their own, give too much away and it takes away from the imagination.

Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a look into our redemptive future possibilities.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

I never heard of a Jazz musician who retired. You love what you do, so what are you going to do… play for the walls?

Keep on listening and tapping your feet.

Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain.

It’s not what they think, it’s about what’s best for the music.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

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

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.

Once you have been bitten by the Jazz bug, it is not a choice anymore.

Never lose the groove to find a note.

People like the idea of the trio and so I did mostly trio.

You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it.

Living is easy with eyes closed.

Canada has a passive-aggressive culture, with a lot of sarcasm and righteousness. That went with my weird messianic complex. The ego is a fascinating monster. I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet.