Listening is more important than anything else because that's what music is. Somebody is playing something and you're receiving it. It is sending and receiving.

I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

What's interesting about a person without problems?

I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.

I dont enjoy traveling in America. I dont like the food, the cars. It is not exotic enough. It all tastes a bit like airline food.

Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker seemed so sophisticated and bad. I wanted to be like that.

One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.

I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.

If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.

Best way to deal with fear is to confront it.

Once you go silent everyone starts misinterpreting what your silence says.

I knew people were going to see me see deteriorate before their eyes.

When caricaturist, Al Hirschfeld, did a drawing of a celebrity, it often looked more like the person than the person did. That's our goal in animation.

The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifference

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune's spite; revive from ashes and rise.

For one thing we may be grateful: this life is not eternal.

Our days of praise shall ne'er be past While life, and thought, and being last, And immortality endures.