Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn't have a choice.

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it's like the human voice.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

Other than conversation, no other art form can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction like Jazz.

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. they are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence.

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won't come out.

I practiced saxophone eight hours a day for the first two years I played.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Chuck Norris will never have a heart attack. His heart isn't nearly foolish enough to attack him.

Betrayal dressed in love and trimmed with the facade of good intentions is the most barbaric of all betrayals.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

The goal is partly the enjoyment; it doesn't come later, but within the very process of the struggle.

There is no thing we cannot overcome Say not thy evil instinct is inherited, Or that some trait inborn makes thy whole life forlorn, And calls down punishment that is not merited.

Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.

All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not.

Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.