I don't like to hear someone put down dixieland. Those people who say there's no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don't know.

Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

If you sacrifice your art because of some woman, or some man, or for some color, or for some wealth, you can't be trusted.

Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.

Real love is the shared loneliness".

A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.

I love to take something ordinary and make it really special.

Life is moral responsibility.

Don Quixote was a song for a 1969 Michael Douglas movie called Hail Hero! I wrote the title song for the film and they also used the Don Quixote one I had submitted.

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and is lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe.

An energetic man will succeed where an indolent one would vegetate and inevitably perish.

And all the haters I swear, they look so small from up here.

I like to do projects I feel some connection to.