Diana Krall

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

Love songs last because they are about feelings that don’t change.

I’ve sung a lot of emotional songs, but when you’re writing it’s very difficult to decide what to reveal.

The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.

You want the listener to find the song on their own, give too much away and it takes away from the imagination.

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.

I still love the whole history of Jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Music gives us a lot of things and it only wants one thing back… your attention.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

It’s the same for listeners. If you can’t stand your girlfriend, can’t take it anymore, put on your headphones and escape into another world.

I developed in my head that I’m never any better than my last concert or the last time I played, so it’s like an audition each time. You get nervous just before going onstage. I still have that, but I think it’s more like concern. You’re concerned about the people – like meeting your in-laws for the first time.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

Jazz music is collective creativity.

The qualities in music I consider most important are beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination and sincerity.