I'm not interested in a marketable product: I'm interested in what I know from my life experience to be standards of excellence

When I joined the trio, it was as if I was capable of driving a sports car at 60, but Ray Brown and Oscar Peterson just kept pressing the pedal down, and I was trying to control the car at 80!

Playing scales is like a boxer skipping rope or punching a bag. It's not the thing in itself; it's preparatory to the activity

Charlie Christians' contributions to the electric guitar are as big as Thomas Edisons' contributions to the world.

Charlie Christian showed me a lot, and was a great help, but even then, I realised that if I was going to make it, it was no use copying Charlie

he signed his work .. you could always tell when it was Herb Ellis playing

A little stupid is like a little forest fire. If you happen upon some stupid, please stomp it out before it spreads.

You must dare to make new voyages.

An ordinary method will never produce extraordinary expectation of a prayer life.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

...as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth...

We are all children coming inside from recess with varying degrees of dirt on us.

Recovery is something that you have to work on every single day and it's something that it doesn't get a day off.

There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.

Self, service, substance is the Divine order and nothing counts until we give ourselves.

I didn't sign any contracts, and I didn't see any oil.