...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.

Its more about conception and touch and spirit and soul than whether my hardware was in place.

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

One very fundamental thing has not changed and I realized that it will never change... is that I really need to go home and practice.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

Most guys at Berklee are going to wind up truck drivers.

More and more as time has gone on, I realize that playing is really more about listening than it is about playing.

Smokin' at the Half Note is the absolute greatest jazz-guitar album ever made. It is also the record that taught me how to play.

Learning to play is mostly about learning to hear, and learning to really listen deeply to sound in a musical way is a lifetime's worth of work.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

There are two ways to live a life either forget everything or, remember nothing.

I've learned one thing: you can only really get to know a person after a row. Only then can you judge their true character!

The journey is greater than the destination.

An important characteristic of calm abiding meditation is to let go of any goal and simply sit for the sake of sitting. We breathe in and out, and we just watch that. Nothing else.

A state is a perfect body of free men, united together to enjoy common rights and advantages.

The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.

We are dust and to dust return. In the end we're neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.

Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn.

One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.

I wish people had half the honor of dragons.