Alicia Keys

The memory of a day like today reminds me to hold the ones I love that much tighter, that much longer… Take that much more time to be present and to feel the blessing of another day…

I want to make sure all the issues about race are addressed

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

How incredible our ancestors were. The first astrophysicists, scientists, physicians, mathematicians, architects, creators of so much of the world as we know it. It’s a blessing to know what cloth you’re cut from!

Everyone deserves an equal chance at success.

Love is real, love is pure, you only take what you give and give what you take. At its purest it is real. No pretending.

Jazz goes into my coffee in the morning, in my wine at night.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to “borrow” a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one’s own.

I was a nerd academically. But I was also an athlete and a musician. I never wanted to be shut out of any situation. I think it was that more than anything.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

I don’t believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from.

I’m going to make music out of whatever style it is, being true to the artform itself.

My version of Georgia became the state song of Georgia. That was a big thing for me, man. It really touched me. Here is a state that used to lynch people like me suddenly declaring my version of a song as its state song. That is touching.

In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

I’m just trying to create context for me to improve my musicianship.

The blues fitted in with the early 60s, the social way of life at the time.

Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents. There must be respect for the people that have gone before.