The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.

Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.

I think maybe because of the kind of music I sing people want to believe you're a diva. They can't believe after eight years and eight albums you're still relatively sane. I feel like they almost want me to throw something at somebody.

We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

Boy bands should be exploded from a great height. They're just pretty people singing music written by others.

I don't have any real spirituality in my life - I'm kind of an atheist - but when music can take me to the highest heights it's almost like a spiritual feeling. It fills that void for me.

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?

I like having my hair and face done but I'm not going to lose weight because someone tells me to. I make music to be a musician not to be on the cover of Playboy.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

With more than 67 percent of the Nation's freight moving on highways economists believe that our ability to compete internationally is tied to the quality of our infrastructure.