Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments & collectively create a thing of beauty.

The American drummer is a one-man percussion orchestra.

I think that the rhythm sections, drummers in particular, are the unsuing heroes of the music. It's the rhythm section that has changed the styles from one period to the other.

Music mirrors where we should go, have gone and can go. Music is an abstraction.

I always resented the role of a drummer as nothing more than a subservient figure.

You can't write the same book twice. Though I've been in historical musical situations, I can't go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.

Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

They had all this talent, and they had no instruments. So they started rap music. They rhymed on their own. They made their own sounds and their own movements.

The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of their instrument.

Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

I mostly hope you think I miss you and in the end you hope you'll get me, but that's fantasy, untrue as you, and bitter as the hope you left me.

Affinities are rare. They come but a few times in a life. It is awful to risk losing one when it arrives.

The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health and power.

People talk about revelation, and say it has ceased; but what ignorance it bespeaks, when man knows not the least thing on earth without revelation.

Maid of the luminous grey-eyes, Mistress of honey and marble implacable white thighs and Goddess, chaste daughter of Zeus.

It is common error to infer that things which are consecutive in order of time have necessarily the relation of cause and effect.

I would spend absolutely every last minute with my kids, telling them how much I love them and how much I would do for them.

Because God's justice is inexorable, it is hard to obtain forgiveness for sins committed with complete deliberation.

Bury you with Satan, to hell then I bury ya. I'm like Lucifer the unforgiven, cast out of heaven, I much rather rule in hell than be a servant. A hell on earth survivor means you better be a earner.