First of all, I swore it was two people playing. When I finally admitted to myself that was one man, I gave up the piano for a month. I figured it was hopeless to practice.

It's the group sound that's important, even when you're playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz.

I'm a musician and, just as the critics are hard on me, I'm hard on the critics.

If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.

I don't do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn't care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

We're not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.

It's the group sound that's important, even when you're playing a solo.

He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.

I despair about the lack of proper respect shown for the piano. If you want it to sound like a traffic jam, go out in the street and forget the piano. That's not a piano sound.

I am the worlds laziest writer.

I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally.

I have brought you the rose of love, and you have crowned me, in these dark hours, with their thorns.

The epitome of culture is the search for truth, or at least a reasonable approximation of reality, most notably the need to know ourselves and the world around us.

No man can get rich himself unless he enriches others.

President [Barack] Obama's pick of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education was abysmal.

There can be no peace, no stability as long as occupation and aggression continue.

A new oath holds pretty well; but... when it is become old, and frayed out, and damaged by a dozen annual retryings of its remains, it ceases to be serviceable; any little strain will snap it.

Life is a bank account, there are no withdrawals without first putting something in.

I study much, and the more I study, the oftener I go back to those first principles which are so simple that childhood itself can lisp them.

Five things are requisite to a good officer — ability, clean hands, despatch, patience, and impartiality.