The record companies are interested in the kind of sales they can get from the rock groups.

My juices needed restoring. I needed a sabbatical from the record business.

To play today in London, next week in Madrid and the week after that in Warsaw is a bit better than playing Newark and Baltimore and Philadelphia. I've been doing that for 20 years.

Amsterdam must have more than a million people. But the only area where jazz is really profitable and successful in an economic sense is in Japan. That's because they haven't been exposed enough.

Sponsors and networks will really go all out and simply evaluate people on the basis of talent.

Jazz is America's own. It is played and listened to by all peoples - in harmony together. Pigmentation differences have no place... as in genuine democracy, only performance counts.

If you don't get substantially what you want, be ready to walk. And don't look back.

There are very few groups that really stay together. The leaders of groups make enough money to be able to afford to work a maximum of 35-40 weeks a year.

If I were to put on Barbra Streisand and Duke Ellington, one might say the combination isn't good.

I don't say that the supposed Civil Rights development is a myth, but it's a matter of dealing with reality. It's purely peripheral and, in many cases, it's just a facade.

Germany is probably the richest country in Western Europe. Yet they wouldn't take any television with Duke and Ella, their reaction being that people weren't interested in it.

Take me back into the time when I lost track of time!

Love risk when making money. Hate risk when investing money.

The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.

Nothing that Shakespeare ever invented was to equal Lincoln's invention of himself and, in the process, us.

I've always been making up my own restrictions for myself, from day one, and it's compelling, because it forces me to think. That's always been a driving force for me.

I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

The spiritual heritage of the godly lives on after they are gone.

There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.

With stores like Topshop and H&M you can find really great stuff, but I do like designer things as well, and I'm lucky because they approach me to wear their stuff. I really love Miu Miu.

I'd be that James Bond character from the Beautyrest commercial that we did. Maybe some day.