There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.

Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.

I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.

Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy

The loudest noise in the world is silence.

Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by... What you don't play can be more important than what you do.

Jazz is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently.

The only cats worth anything are the cats that take chances.

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.

Passion is a greater height of motivation that keeps you going strong even when the end is far from being near.

What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.

The mark of the superior thinker is his or her ability to accurately predict the consequences of doing or not doing something.

The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.

A major part of the meaning of life is contained in the very process of discovering it.

Neither the intensity of your feelings nor the certainty of your convictions is any assurance that you are right.

I want to die on your chest but not yet she wrote sometime in the 13th century of our love

The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution (AIDS).

Middle-class societies don't emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be CREATED through political action.

There really is no such thing as failure. There is only the rearrangement of plans and surrender of ego.