We think about sitting in a space and hearing some music by having our ears pointed forward towards the musicians sitting opposite us. I'm really not following that paradigm at all.

Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.

Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening

I am also interested in music expanding consciousness. By expanding consciousness, I mean that old patterns can be replaced with new ones.

Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears

Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.

When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.

Working in theoretical systems can take away the juice. It can also be very beautiful, but when you're trying to satisfy a theoretical principle rather than a sonic reality, then it can become dry.

Deep listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding - making sounds.

Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.

I feel that students always learn more from each other than they do from their professor. They learn by doing and not by trying to soak up information from one person.

People such as Hunter S. Thompson and the Beats were a huge influence on me, not just in what they were saying, but how they said it.

Maybe some people just aren't meant to be in our lives forever. Maybe some people are just passing through.

You can't speak for the people unless you're able to walk amongst the people. And how many of these rappers out here actually hang out with regular people?

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

Quit worrying about how everything is going to turn out. Live one day at a time; better yet, make the most of this moment.

You need people who are shaping and advocating for the actual policies and structural changes that need to occur in order to address those issues. That's where the politics and t

You just watch somebody you love slowly, slowly disappear and go away.

It is one of the vexatious mortifications of a studious man to have his thoughts disordered by a tedious visit.

The first time I got onstage was when I was about 5 years old. It was at a church social, and I had a poem to recite.