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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Values aren't buses... They're not supposed to get you anywhere. They're supposed to define who you are.

The game isn't big enough unless it scares you a little. Cmdr. William Riker

For anyone aspiring to be anything, I would like them to realise dreams require work. So work big time.

[U]nless a woman is held, by man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force.

When I look back, it was a strange period in my life, looking at my childhood and then my teenage years and forming Slayer when I was still 17, not out of high school.

Racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional.....All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting such discrimination must yield to this principle.

For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who "believe and tremble" has one.

If you're wasting time, you're wasting money... and that's just sick.

It's every man for himself, every woman, every child. A new breed ferocious and wild.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.