Music is what you notice when it's no longer in your presence.

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.

We travel to new places, with every book, we read.

You gain much more from your enemies than friends.

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.

What ever you think, you can make it real.

Some seeksolace inwhiskey, I drown mysorrowsin ink.

Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses.

Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I try to dissect souls.

Southerners are so devoted to genealogy that we see a family tree under every bush.

The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is indivisible, they ascribe but little to it, and think it but one remove from nothing.

It's not just what you say that stirs people. It's the way that you say it.