I don't think I went a year or so without a record between 1959 and 1979, sometimes two.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I think I have more in common with a carpenter than you might think. We're putting things together.

God has a way of telling you when to change your strings.

You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.

When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.

Bifurcation embraces the weapon of success and failure.

People in the midst of losing their patience are certainly experiencing as aspect of dukkha.

Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.

The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.

The state of man is inconstancy, ennui, anxiety.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.

Never trust a woman who will not lie about her age after thirty. She is unwomanly and unhuman and there is no knowing what crimes she will commit.

I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him.

Garden work clears the mind.

A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one's own ignorance.