I'm playing 10 feet from Mike Campbell every night. I look across the stage, there's Howie. Tom's in the middle and we're playing all this stuff I love. It's great.

If you call attention to yourself at the expense of the song, that's the cardinal sin.

Sometimes you work with somebody you've never heard of because you just feel like working.

I loved Mal Evans holding one note down on You Won't See Me from Rubber Soul.

I got to play on a couple of records with the Rolling Stones, and that was really special to me.

I loved working with Bob Dylan.

I think I drift toward sad love songs.

You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that's great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don't want to get in the way of the song.

I try to find little things that you can do to move the song along and things that serve the song.

I think we've always been better live.

Fortunately, as we all know, it's impossible for anybody but Jimmy Smith to really sound like Jimmy Smith.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

I am still the same person doing the same science. Why are people so impressed when some academy in Sweden gives an award?

I am determined to hold on as long as possible, but if I should disappear, I should not have had the time to familiarize my successors with the necessary information.

It's a blast to watch. It's a lot more interesting live than it is on record. I mean, it really is a theatrical event. It's a sporting event! Cause you never know what's gonna happen.

There's nothing worse, I guess, than being black in an all-white church or being southern and being a liberal.

It's always nice to want money and keep doin' what you gotta do to get it, but do not be greedy.

You express different energies at different times in your life.

I wrote my first play when I was eight.

The reality is customers lie - not because they want to want to deceive you, but because they don't do a good job of predicting what they will do in the future.

Biocides, for example, are designed to kill bacteria—it's not a benign material.