There needs to be more risk-taking out there. Things like Twitter and the blogosphere are so instantaneously critical that it's actually created a culture of artistic fear to branch out too much because you don't want to be slammed.

I wrote a pretty good dad joke in the car: How did the grammar teacher die? He got overly hyphenated and slipped into a comma.

[observation, 2015] The last few days were nothing but sociopaths. I watched all of 'The Jinx'. Then I watched 'Nightcrawler'.Then I watched 'Foxcatcher'. It was like, "0h mg God, all these men are exactly the same.

I think we're all so in our heads as singers that if you start to develop all sorts of quirks and superstitions, it just starts to build on itself and eventually you're wearing six pairs of underwear and won't go out to the audience unless they're all faced to the left. I try to keep my rituals to a minimum for my own mental sanity.

[on 'You Raise Me Up'] I can be cynical backstage about songs and be like, 'There's this song or that song that I can absolutely not get offstage without singing'. But to have a song like that - that's a career song. It's the kind if song that has a universal message for people, and people love to hear it. Every time you see that audience reaction, every time you sing it again, you go 'Man, what a lucky thing to have a song like this'.

[on the death of James Gandolfini] Thank you James Gandolfini for some of the most brilliant TV moments of all time. So sad!

Half of my brain has always been about the seriousness of music, about singing my guts out, and about trying to elevate the song to a place there's no laughter allowed. At least not on purpose. And then the other side of me doesn't take myself seriously at all and is a complete goofball, and loved playing theater games with my improv team when I was younger. I think it's trying to be intelligent about when and where you let those sides of you shine.

[on working with producer Rick Rubin on "Illuminations"] The co-writing was a bit of a surprise for me. I trust Rick's ear tremendously and I trust his ability to take any style of music - and my style was completely new to him - and put it through his filter. I think his motto for me was "I know you can sing your ass off. I want these songs to be coming from you rather than just being presented by you as a vocalist".

My relationship with David Foster is arguably better than it's ever been. He's always been a wonderful friend and mentor, and we've always known from the beginning that sometimes we'll work together and sometimes we won't. We have a much more meaningful relationship in each other's lives that goes far beyond whether we make an album together or not.

My mom gets two Christmas trees every year. She loves them and had too many ornaments for one, so she gets two. If you can walk through the hallway without getting stuck in the eye by a pine needle, then it can't be Christmas.

No matter what your age and no matter where you come from, everyone can change the world in some way, whether it's being a mentor to someone younger than you or someone that doesn't have as much experience as you. If you're passionate enough, you can do whatever you want and definitely change the world.

The shower is my time to open up my operatic chops, because of the enormous echo. You sound five times as big in the shower, so I break into some "Nessun Dorma" [from Giacomo Puccini's "Turandot"] or Pearl Jam. You've got to go big when you're in the shower. There's no half-singing in the shower, you're either a rock star or an opera diva.

[People Weekly, 6/21/04] I hope to break through the Top 40, not by changing what I do but by changing the way people think.

[in 2001 interview] I sang all my life. My parents had me singing around the house when I was younger. I'm not from a showbiz family or anything. It's just something I enjoyed doing. When I started getting into seventh or eighth grade, I became part of the theater program. I went to L.A. County High School for the Arts and did more singing there. It's really something I did on the side and then I met David Foster. I was working with a voice teacher who was a friend of the family's. David . . . called him and told him he needed a singer for an event he was doing. That's how that started.