Harry Connick, Jr. Quotes

I'm sure that there are reasonable people that had some reasonable projections about the future of New Orleans, but none of those could include not trying to rebuild the city and make it better than it was before.

[My mother is] a half-Chinese, half-Jamaican woman, who grew up the ninth of nine kids, getting a law degree from Harvard. Academically brilliant, but also incredibly strong-willed and ethical. My mother was like that, my sister is, and my wife is too.

I don't want to say the same lines every night.

I don't really get shaken very much. People could heckle me, a spotlight could go out, I could forget a lyric ... I'm not operating on somebody's brain, you know what I mean? So I just think it's all funny.

I think a dad has to make his daughter feel that he's genuinely interested in what she's going through.

I'm not a movie star. People know me, but they don't necessarily know what they know me for. I get recognised, but it's not like Justin Bieber. It's a nice thing, people are cool.

You know, things kind of happen organically and, you know, Broadway sort of happened out of a career in performing and - which happened out of practicing piano when I was a kid.

No matter what genre of music you play when you rack up a couple years of experience, you have your own point of view no matter who it is that is coming in front of you whether it's a pop artist or a country artist. Whoever.

I'm not a big goal guy.

I had an old man moment the other day. I went into Abercrombie & Fitch to get some jeans and the music was so loud I couldn't stay.

[When asked how he's keeping his 12-year marriage to wife Jill fresh] Hookers, drugs. We're playing the field right now.

Not everybody gets to record with an orchestra, and not everybody that gets to record with an orchestra gets to write all their own stuff.

I used to go to Bourbon Street when I was a kid and there would be club after club after club of people who were around when the music started. I mean these are legendary, maybe not so well known, but legendary musicians.

The two are unrelated. I'm not into turtles or space stuff.

If you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that's a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don't like the melodies, and vice versa.

I love my wife and I know she loves me. We're best friends. We're just lucky to have found each other. It takes a lot of work but I just feel very blessed that I found the right person. It's a very fortunate situation and not everyone has that.

New Orleans is a city of paradox. Sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so intertwined yet so separate.

Let's kick the tires and light the fires, big daddy.

I'm not trying to be romantic. I think you can tell when people are trying to be sexy onstage. When I was doing 'All the Way,' I was really thinking about my wife. People don't know my personal experience, but they can tell it's an honest interpretation.

[Being judge] is about being honest and giving everybody a fair shot and telling them what you think. Sometimes it's good and sometimes it isn't. It's more important to be honest than say things to make people feel better. I don't think you have to be rude, but I think you have to be honest. But I think it's really important to be specific: Here's what you did that was great and why. And here's what you did that wasn't great and why.

I'm looking at [my daughter] right now. To think that I am her dad is the greatest honor in the world. She's an amazing kid. We have a great relationship and she is one of my closest friends. I seek her advice. I like to know what she thinks about things, and she's helped me through some really tough times. I just look forward to years of developing that relationship.

I have a big ego, and I'm a confident person, but when it comes down to being a jerk, that doesn't work for me, I tried it ... for about ten years.

I guess play piano, you know, because that's the thing I started doing when I was a little kid.

You know what's funny? I don't ever feel the need to escape. I have a strong marriage. I like my life. You hear about these guys having midlife crises - I don't see that happening to me.

I only tour in short bursts, I'm only ever away from my family and three daughters for a month or two.

My dad and mom believed that you do what you have to do in private and don't make a big deal out of it. Just try to help people as much as you can.

Before I had kids I'd go out on the road for months and months at a time, but now I don't think I'd want to do that anymore, because I'd miss too much time at home, so it's just a matter of monitoring how much work that I do and how much time I'm on the road.

Life is really like that: there are certain things that are wonderful and certain things that are not so wonderful and what you are going to do about it. With grace and with dignity, move through them. Deal with them.

'The Christmas Song,' by Nat King Cole, is not only a masterful performance; to me it just sounds like the holidays. I've never sung it, because Nat's version is so perfect. I gotta leave it alone.

Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs and bring about my interpretation of them.

I have those dreams that you can't put into words.

As you work on something, whether it's a painting or a piece of music, it's going to evolve. A relationship is like that too.

The whole 'American Idol' way of looking at things is the antithesis of what I grew up with. There are a whole lot of kids wanting to be famous now, whereas if I'd even mentioned that word to one of my teachers, I would have got into a whole load of trouble.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.

My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.

We would like to get to a point in our society where people really are colorblind and this message would not have to be told anymore. Unfortunately, we're not there yet.

I'm a huge Freddie Mercury fan. I think he was the end-all. I love his lack of inhibition, his talent, the chances he took. He made mistakes on his records, and he didn't care.

I say sorry to my wife about five times a day for various reasons.

I sing because I've forgotten how to scream.

I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So everything I do at this point is more philosophical.

I practice and work hard at my music, but I'm not saving lives here.

I just liked the feeling of being on stage.

There are more than 300,000 families in the Gulf region that lost their homes and are waiting for peace of mind. The hurricane exposed the sad reality of poverty in America. We saw, in all its horrific detail, the vulnerabilities of living in inadequate housing and the heartbreak of losing one's home.

I had tons of friends, played ball with my friends on the street, and did the normal things.

Sometimes you try a song and people don't respond, or you tell a story and you just hear crickets. But when you play thousands of shows, you start to refine stuff.

I married my best friend. And I listen! Ultimately I've been very fortunate - I understand that that doesn't happen for everybody but it happened for us and we take it very seriously.

I do the things I like to do. It's sort of a bigger version of having more than one hobby.

I've been all over the world. I love New York, I love Paris, San Francisco, so many places. But there's no place like New Orleans. It's got the best food. It's got the best music. It's got the best people. It's got the most fun stuff to do.

I don't really find girls to be any more dramatic or delicate than boys; I've known plenty of little boys who've had miserable breakdowns over things ... in fact, I was one of them!

They don't make you what you are, you do. You are what you choose to be.

There are people who can't stand me, they say, 'God, he makes me sick', or, 'He's creepy', but it doesn't affect me too badly.

You can't have a perfect show every time.

I struggle every day with trying to be a better dad, a better husband, better musician, better artist. It consumes me, and I don't see an end in sight.

In my life I find that memories of the spirit linger and sweeten long after memories of the brain have faded.

New Orleans is my essence, my soul, my muse ...

We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes, 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

Live theater is just an incredibly powerful medium, and I think anyone who goes, whether they know about it or not, if they see something that sort of fits with them, it's kind of hard to deny that they had a good time.

I don't ever feel the need to escape.

I'm really boring, man. Like, I'm really dull. And I think people may think that I have this glamorous, fun lifestyle, but it's pretty dull. But that's what I like.

When I did the album for 'When Harry Met Sally,' I found myself out there in front of this big band, which I had no idea how to do, and they wiped the floor with me. It's a very specific skill, and I didn't know how to do it.

You won't talk to anybody who breaks lyrics down more thoroughly. It's just a complete deconstruction, and when you start to rebuild, nobody has the capacity to do it like me. Which is not to say I'm better, it's just that there's a unique quality to everyone.

Everything I do is part of my passion.

You have to read scripts and audition and develop relationships. It takes a long time to develop a body of work but over the last 25 years I guess I've done that many movies. In hindsight it may seem effortless, but there's a lot of work that goes into it.

Well, my mother, I knew until I was 13. She died when I was 13.

I've spent hours playing video games.