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.

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

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.

One of the greatest inhibitions to the development of human potential is the aversion to effective practice.

It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.

Every Thanksgiving we feed the homeless so they may join us as we celebrate other people finding a home.

I hate working with artists who don't have something to say or when they have something that sounds cool but isn't really them.

You just never set roots; you take pleasure in simple conversations, because you know you're not going to have much more than that. It's very isolating, and that can be a good thing.

I think there's more women that watch me than men, but I don't look at myself as just a minister to women. My ministry began that way, but I really feel like the Word of God is for everybody.

We are servants of Ma’at—order and justice. We don’t kill our enemies for things they might do in the future.

Where, with your one rose you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.

I think that it's much easier for a recording artist to become an actor than for an actor to become a recording artist.