I feel that I have an obligation to jazz and also to myself to play as good as I can play.

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.

Your educators can only be your liberators.

Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.

My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those who are sad.

To be poor is to suffer. It's the kind of suffering that freezes the heart stone cold.

Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.

All photographs are far more important than any painting.

Our business is to present the Christian faith clothed in modern terms, not to propagate modern thought clothed in Christian terms... Confusion here is fatal.

I'm severely conservative.

One of the attributes of love . . . is to bring harmony and order out of chaos.

I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life.