I’d love to do a musical. I’ve been known to have a good step or two. I’m half Samoan, you know, and part of our culture is singing and dancing daily.

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‚Happy Birthday.‘

I was asked to act when I couldn’t act. I was asked to sing ‚Funny Face‘ when I couldn’t sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn’t dance – and do all kinds of things I wasn’t prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.

I believe in singing.

I get nervous when I don’t get nervous. If I’m nervous I know I’m going to have a good show.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

I was always singing but didn’t plan on pursuing it seriously. When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn – I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point – and that was it.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

I’m a singer, a writer and an actress – when I find something that I feel good enough about doing.

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

Some people ask the secret of our long marriage. We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner, soft music and dancing. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.

I always use Michael as, first and foremost, a vocal inspiration, and ‚Off the Wall‘ was definitely the one that made me feel like I could sing.

I’ve always been a singer. I never really decided I was gonna be a singer. It just kind of – I just sung a lot.

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings – to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Aside from singing, I’m also a dancer. I’ve been dancing since I was 8.

I like to sing ballads the way Eddie Fisher does and the way Perry Como does. But the way I’m singing now is what makes the money.

If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.

My mother is a singer, my sisters all sing, my uncles are incredible singers and guitar players, so it’s just kind of been like my habitat.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

I prefer musicals, because I am the best dancer who ever lived. The best plies, the best sashays, and by far the best-smelling Capezios.

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

In a long meter hymn, a singer – they call it ‚lays out a line.‘ And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight, you can’t wedge a pin between it.

Dancing in high heels is kind of tough. I learn the dances without the heels, and then we add them. We just practice, and I get used to it. My feet hurt really badly at the end of the shows, but it’s fun. While it’s happening it’s fun. I feel tall.

Occasionally, some brother sings very earnestly through his nose, often disturbing those around him, but it does not matter how the voice sounds to the ears of man. What is important is how the heart sounds to the ears of God.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

Doing stand-up is like running across a frozen pond with the ice breaking behind you. I love it because it’s dangerous.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn’t copy my style from anybody.

Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

A chorus is not easy.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

You aren’t normal if you sing to people. You aren’t a normal person. It’s nerve-racking.

Black and brown pride have been taught in my household for a long time.

I sang a lot of low stuff on songs like ‚Secrets‘ and ‚Rockin‘,‘ almost like Toni Braxton. On ‚Secrets,‘ I’m a different person.

My whole life, I’ve sung and listened to music, and since the beginning, I’ve had iTunes and used Apple Music for streaming.

I was honoured when they asked me to appear at the president’s birthday rally in Madison Square Garden. There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing ‚Happy Birthday,‘ like if I had been wearing a slip, I would have thought it was showing or something. I thought, ‚Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out!‘

I knew that I was ‚interesting‘ at 18 because I was aware that I could get away with doing things on stage.

All of my brothers and sisters are very talented. They all sang all right.

If I heard someone else singing like me, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

As much as I’m a black person from America, I’m a black person from Africa, too.

I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I’m not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.

My first job was singing on the Cas Walker radio show in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was about 10 years old, and I thought it was big time.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know.

I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.

I signed up to be a musician, I want to perform, I want to sing.

I’ve taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.

My dancing is Hawaiian-inspired but I also get a little fresh when it comes to my faster songs.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.

Doing a show for three weeks is nothing like doing a show for seven seasons.

Whatever I’m feeling, whatever I’m going through, whatever mood I’m in… If I’m feeling like dancing or clubbing, then it will be reflected in the music. If I’m feeling dark and vulnerable, then it will reflect in the music, too.

I can’t imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

Some artists just ruin their voices because they don’t know any better.

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.