From 1962 to 1965, the guitar became this icon of youth culture, thanks mostly to the Beatles

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.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

He looked as though I'd just run over his pet puppy (though no actual puppies were harmed in the formation of that metaphor).

The realism frightens me more than the bubble gum-y, heightened stuff.

The idea that you earn things - that you earn respect, that you earn income, responsibility. the vote, punishment... these ideas are anathema to the liberal mind.

My prayer is spasmodic, occasional, desperate. It has a great deal to do with my children's physical well-being - that when they're traveling in the air the plane not crash, things like that.

I really feel like I haven't had a job. Playing [baseball] and then doing television. I watched my mom clean houses and stuff, so that's work.

Why don't we follow our yearning?

It would be a fine thing, in which I hardly dare believe, to pass our lives near each other, hypnotized by our dreams.

Every citizen, scientists included, has some obligation to be involved in public affairs and politics.

I remember being in high school and listening to Vivaldi's 'Winter' and being so overwhelmed with emotion.