If you establish an identity, you build a monster-and thats right, youve got to live with it. Of course, you can enjoy it, too.

Perfect retention. I dont think I could do that-Ive never disciplined myself to do it.I suppose a lot of it is a question of discipline. Which improvisation is not.

Learn the rules and then break them in such a way as to exercise good taste.

I always tell people, it took me 10 minutes and 35 years in the business. I get tired of playing it ["Lullaby of Birdland"], but not of collecting the royalties.

When people ask me how is it I was a musician, I facetiously say that I'm a firm believer in reincarnation and in a previous life I was Johann Sebastian Bach's guide dog.

My affiliation with England is borne out by the fact that I do come back for periodic visits.

The way it works: The orchestra plays a few selections of its own and I terminate the first part of the programme on piano, usually with a movement from a Mozart concerto.

Can anybody be given creativity? No. Only equipment to develop it if it's in them in the first place.

You know, when you've established a certain thing, what can you do? You're stuck with it.

I don't like freedom jazz - I think it's void of roots and void of foundation.

In Braille you write your flat sign first and then your note.

A wise person is able to bring down a thousand armies with a single insight

Bipolar is an illness not a hopeless destination it can be maintained with proper medication

It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.

writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind.

Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one's ability to do so.

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed-chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got of their bark hides.

There's not a woman in the book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by Chapter 29.

We invent our technologies and then we turn around and use our technologies to reinvent ourselves as individuals, communities and cultures.

I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness.

Somebody is always suspecting Russia of having some ambitions, there are always those who are trying to misinterpret us or keep something back.