I always say that improvisation is the utterance of one's spirit, and it dictates your life experience, and that's how you find your concepts and your way for painting your musical picture.

I'm a great cook. People have asked me to do a cookbook.

I believe that music should really be without boundaries.

One of the things that I love about Sarah Vaughan is that she was always very current.

The biggest thing is to just keep your voice in shape so that when the emotion hits, it's there to have the colors to paint those pictures with the lyrics as well as the sound.

When I sing a song, I want someone to recognize 'Now that's Dianne singing that song.'

I didn't learn the word 'genre' until way, way late - I mean, like, in the '80s.

Jazz onstage is a very intimate exchange between everybody that's onstage.

I come from a family of storytellers. My grandmother was great at telling stories, and my mother was an amazing storyteller.

I love being with artists because I'm always open to getting into something.

Herb Wong was an incredible man. We met when I was performing with Clark Terry at the Wichita Jazz Festival around 1974.

My mother was really amazing and left me with a whole lot of treasures. I miss her terribly.

I have one closet that's just shoes. The woman go, 'Amen,' and the men go, 'Oh my God.' It's color-coordinated from the ceiling to the floor, from evening to casual.

I listen to music all the time, and a lot of the things I cover are the standards of my time, and they work for me.

I never called myself a jazz singer. I just call myself a vocalist because I love to sing all kinds of things.

Jazz musicians have always tended to have cult followings, which is pretty wonderful.

Brazilian music has been a part of almost every record I've done, and I'd eventually like to record an entire album of Brazilian music.

My life has been going in ways I never could have dreamed of - doing the closing celebration for the Olympic Games and being appointed the creative chair for jazz at the L.A. Philharmonic. So I've just decided I'll go with my flow and be very prepared.

If a song feels good to me, it's not very difficult to make it my own.

I look back at Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and especially Betty Carter, whom I admire the most, and I say, OK, they set a standard of excellence. I listen to them not for what they are doing, but to study where they are coming from because, for me, jazz is life experience.

In any event, I'm proud to wear the badge of jazz vocalist if that's what people want to call me; but at the same time, there are many other things I like to do.

The Confederate flag is a divisive presence - it's the opposite of everything my artistry means and represents.

My IQ is somewhere between Spiro Agnew's and Albert Einstein's.

If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either.

In the main, ghosts are said to be forlorn and generally miserable, if not downright depressed. The jolly ghost is rare.

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.

Why are people afraid of ghosts? 'Ooh, no, I wouldn't want to see one! I'd be too scared' - accompanied by a tremolo of fear in the voice - is the common reaction. This puzzles me. I'd think anyone would welcome he opportunity. I've never heard of a ghost hurting anybody.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.

Japanese is sort of a hobby of mine, and I can get around Japan with ease.

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.

William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.

If your parents never had children, chances are... neither will you.

The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I'm not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.

Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the man handling it knows what he is doing.

I feel like I've been watching Irwin Corey forever. I saw him in the 1950s, and I thought he was old then.

Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

Statistically, I'd say comedy writers are perhaps the sanest category of show people. And why not? They make big money, and although it's not an easy trade - particularly when you're at your galley oar five days a week - it's easier on the nerves and the psyche than living with the brain-squeezing pressure and cares of being the Star.

You have to be on TV a surprisingly long time before you're stopped on the street. Then, when you are, you get a lot of, 'Hey, you're great! What's your name again?'

There are online forms you can fill out to send to your lawmakers, demanding that nothing - nothing at all or in any way - be done about any guns whatever, anywhere.

I'm the only talk show host, I think, if there's such a category in, what's called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.

Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.

It's no fun being a specimen.

I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.

Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer's life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

I don't feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.