Alanis Morissette

I am what I am Are you what you are or What?

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

I was motivated by just thinking that if you had all this external success that everyone would love you and everything would be peaceful and wonderful.

What I have to say is far more important than how long my eyelashes are.

I could write six songs in one day with everything that’s going on.

If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I’ve also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.

Art should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise.

I’m believe that all people are in possession of what might be called a ‘universal musical mind.’

There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

Actually, I think the more Ben [Taylor] sings, the less like James he sounds.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

I’ll always write music. Whether I release a record, whether I let the public hear it or not, I’m always writing music.

Audiences are smart. They are not going to come out to see you unless you are honest.

Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.

Music is an addiction.

I went back and listened to the first three albums I made and tried to figure out what was special about them, why people keep going back to them. I think it was because I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no idea if they were going to play it on the radio or anything. All I did was write songs, so that’s what I got back to.

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.