The Unity Band project has been life-changing for me. I have led many groups of talented musicians, but this is unlike anything else.

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.

If you want to find something with an equation, you must start thinking like a person who have it.

Individual and national rights to wealth rest on the basis of civil and international law, or at least of custom that has the force of law.

I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States' response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.

Bad sign when the thought of your x-girlfriend sends you reeling in a search for new adjectives to describe stupidity and thoughtlessness?

I had a lot of time and the first year I was in prison, I tried to get the party to stop the shooting, to stop the talk about the gun thing.

We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves.

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

I know where beauty lives, I've seen it once, I know the warmth she gives.

People say it's hard at the top, but it's even harder at the bottom.

My comfort zone is press conferences.