I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.

My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

In my experience, poor people are the world's greatest entrepreneurs. Every day, they must innovate in order to survive. They remain poor because they do not have the opportunities to turn their creativity into sustainable income.

When I was a kid, I played basketball religiously. I begged my mom to get me voice lessons because I wanted to learn to sing the right way, but at the same time, I was playing Junior Olympic basketball, and I was playing point guard for my school. But I was wanting to get into entertainment, into music and film and television.

I feel like what I'm bringing to the table that's different is like not just consistency in the music but consistency in the creativity, consistency in the visuals, in the fashion, participation with the fans and things that I give them and merch and stuff like that. And I'm very active with them.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.