Quotes About Variety

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

If there's too much of you around, people can get tired of you.

If I've made something really serene... well, if everything is like that, it's like having too much icing on your cake. You need something else under it, some kind of grounding. It's like if you're making a film, you can't have only happy moments, or else they become meaningless.

My manager came up with the idea of taking a Pro Tool rig out on the road to record every night and I thought it was a great idea. I felt like it would be good to record over a certain period of time and then take the best performances of that collection of recordings. It appealed to me that it wasn't going to be from just one location.

I think in reality, today, if you use the same tools as everyone else, you kind of build the same products.

We always hark back to what we used to love watching as kids: 'Noel's House Party,' 'Don't Forget Your Toothbrush,' shows that had that live excitement about them. You never knew what was going to happen and I found that really engaging.

My mom always taught me to put toothpaste on pimples to dry them out at night. I do that all the time. I don't use anything fancy when I get a pimple. And I never use the same toothpaste for long because I get bored. So I'll do peppermint and then one month I'll do cinnamon. I'm creative.

When I play live in restaurants and cafes, I don't play my own stuff. I play jazz and 'American Songbook' standards, and I'll fuse it with top 40.

I'm very into my cars. I always ready the Top Gear magazines just to see what cars are out next and what sort of performance they give. It can range from the smallest cars to the biggest ones.

Each political party in America contains people with a hodgepodge of beliefs. Their given positions on a topic may shift slightly - or drastically - from year to year or day to day.

I think I've always approached making albums pretty much the same way. I'm just looking for a mixture of songs and topics that aren't the same thing over and over.

I listened to everything. To the early Motown groups - the Four Tops and the Temptations - to Johnny Mathis, Gloria Lynne - my sisters loved her. Sarah Vaughan. Everything.

I think sometimes producers forget that people like interesting things. It doesn't always have to be 'Big Brother' or toil and torment.

I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.

I cook a little bit. I make a Hungarian dish called chicken paprikash that's out of this world. I'll give a heads-up to all of your readers that it doesn't have to be between Thai and Mexican every night. Toss some Hungarian in every once in a while. You will not be sorry. Good, solid peasant food.

I get bored if I do the same thing. The only constant that I have in my life is that I start whatever I do with my Total Gym, because I believe it helps keep me from getting injured.

It's always good when you can bring two artists together who are totally different.

Every race is totally different.

I kind of like the challenge of jumping into totally different spaces and styles and figuring out how to fit in.

Sharon went on to play classical but we actually went into totally different instruments which was lucky for the band because otherwise we'd all be playing the same thing!!

I guess everywhere I go, I get inspired by those places, and then I have a bunch of Voicenotes on my phone. Everywhere I go, I think of these random melodies. It's crazy because everywhere you go, the melodies are totally different.

We see them come. We see them go. Some are fast. And some are slow. Some are high. And some are slow. Not one of them is like another. Don't ask us why. Go ask your mother.

A fruit salad is delicious precisely because each fruit maintains its own flavor.

Expand your interests in life. Seek out new, interesting experiences, no matter how mundane or inconsequential they might seem to others.