I am interested in my music lasting only while I'm alive. I'm not writing for the future.

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.

It was disconcerting that being in love felt lonelier than lonelines.

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.

Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.

I'm not very ambitious at all.

When you kill someone by chopping off their head, rolling 'em up in a carpet and burning it, you'd better make sure they're dead!

Like all successful politicians I married above myself.

Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.

I came out of independent film, that's my roots.

It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all.

I like not fair terms and a villain's mind.