When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I think I have more in common with a carpenter than you might think. We're putting things together.

God has a way of telling you when to change your strings.

You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.

If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience.

In some crucial cases ... repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power completely to articulate it.

Imperfections don’t make something ugly.

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.

I'm crazy about Dublin. If you went back 3,000 years in my ancestry you wouldn't find a drop of Irish blood in the veins, but I love the place.

I've heard a lot of nasty rhetoric about the president. We're going to kick your rear end out of the White House and stuff. That's just not the way I behave.

A woman is beautiful only when she is loved.

The most beautiful face is always the face of the peaceful mind!

When we are on the water, our contemplative impulses range from the intense to the nearly absent.

I will do as I usually do. Tomorrow is going to be a day like any other day.

It does not matter if you are a rose or a lotus or a marigold. What matters is that you are flowering.