I don't do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn't care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

It's the group sound that's important, even when you're playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz.

I'm a musician and, just as the critics are hard on me, I'm hard on the critics.

If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.

We're not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.

It's the group sound that's important, even when you're playing a solo.

He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.

First of all, I swore it was two people playing. When I finally admitted to myself that was one man, I gave up the piano for a month. I figured it was hopeless to practice.

I despair about the lack of proper respect shown for the piano. If you want it to sound like a traffic jam, go out in the street and forget the piano. That's not a piano sound.

I am the worlds laziest writer.

Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.

You have come a long way, and you do not know it. You have a long way to go, and you do know what that means.

If you have mindfulness, if you feel safe, you recognize that you have plenty of conditions to be happy already, and that you don't need to run into the future in order to get a few more conditions.

The degree to which one is sensitive to other people's suffering, to other (people's) humanity, is the index of one's own humanity

Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality.

It is nasty when you're playing in someone else's house to point out that they don't have enough balls.

Intellectually, I think everyone really knows that women are funny, but it's a weird thing that people keep trotting out.

I'm always looking for people to feel connected to me and inspired in their own right.

Ambition is the death of thought.

I may be revered or defamed and decried; But I tried to live my life right.