I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you're going to do it but when you do it.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

When I have them working together, it's like a beautiful kaleidoscope.

For me, being an innovator doesn't mean being more intelligent, more rich, it's not a word, it's an action.

The idea is more important than the style you're playing in.

You don't have to worry about being a number one, number two, or number three. Numbers don't have anything to do with placement. Numbers only have something to do with repetition.

I don't try to please when I play. I try to cure.

Music has many uses and I think the most perfected use that music has is one of a healing quality.

Whatever you do, it's over when you do it - but first you have to do it.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we've forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We've separated music from life.

The Saviour is seeking to save.

Stale godliness is ungodliness. Let our religion be as warm, and constant, and natural as the flow of the blood in our veins. A living God must be served in a living way.

Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.

What makes sovereign ugliness are our conventions.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.

You got a million drug laws now because the bosses figured there was more money in putting people in jail than taxing something anyone can grow on a window sill.

Any place that we love becomes our world.

Not being able to read and write music is not the same as being illiterate in speech and writing.