You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.

I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

I think music should be judged on what it is. It should be very high and above everything else. It is a beautiful way of bringing people together, a little bit of an oasis in this messed-up world.

Jazz never ends... it just continues.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

I miss playing with Miles. I did play with him a little while before he left the planet, but even at that time I longed to maybe do some things together.

It's all about creation and surprise. It just needs to be appreciated and watered like flowers. You have to water flowers. These peaks will come again.

I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress...so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

To the degree you experience a love deficit you will also manifest a leadership deficit.

An Asetian never tries to talk louder than the crowd surrounding him. An Asetian becomes that crowd.

My Faith in science is the belief of all that is ....."noticeable" ...

No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the walls of memory.

Thoughts will change and shift just like the wind and the water when you're on the boat; thoughts are no different than anything else.

You have to stop living in order to write.

Building up the arms did not cause the fall of Eastern Europe.

Duty does not require any person to submit to the destruction of his personal ambitions and the right to live his own life in his own way.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.