Diana Krall

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

I don’t believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

Just because I’m playing Jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz.

It’s easy in music to tell what’s good. It’s hard to tell what’s bad.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.

[Stratocaster vs Les Paul] It’s a totally different animal. One is for very subtle and, I would say, more musical things that you can distract and abuse. You can’t do that with a Les Paul. It’s too delicate. It’s got a very delicate tone; most people don’t ever realize that because they are plugged into monstrous amplifiers which completely, instantaneously covers up the unique sound quality it has. All those years of development go straight out the window when you overload the amp.

I’m fortunate that I’m making a living at it now because I’m not equipped to do anything else.

Beiderbecke took out a silver cornet, put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying ‘yes.’

One can be very happy without demanding that others agree with them.

What I’m doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word – I love it.

If you dig it, do it. If you dig it a lot, do it again.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.

For me, there wasn’t a line between working and getting paid or simply playing for fun.