Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

Its more about conception and touch and spirit and soul than whether my hardware was in place.

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

One very fundamental thing has not changed and I realized that it will never change... is that I really need to go home and practice.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

Most guys at Berklee are going to wind up truck drivers.

More and more as time has gone on, I realize that playing is really more about listening than it is about playing.

Smokin' at the Half Note is the absolute greatest jazz-guitar album ever made. It is also the record that taught me how to play.

Learning to play is mostly about learning to hear, and learning to really listen deeply to sound in a musical way is a lifetime's worth of work.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.

My personal favorite [ moment] was when someone asked for one selfie too many and [Andy Cohen] snapped and tried to kill her by hugging her.

Nothing happens randomly.

The chief handicap of the blind is not blindness, but the attitude of seeing people towards them.

Each of us embodies, in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time & place, universal truth and everlasting life.

We compensate for what we don't do internally by projecting and allowing our minds to be marinated in chronic fantasy.

I have pain; there is no arguing against sense, but I have peace, I have peace.

Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower.

If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.

Before you judge people, judge yourself.