I'm happy whenever anybody does my material. I don't care what they do with it. I do what I want to with other people's songs.

I went through the whole number, you know. The swing era, the boogie woogie era, the bebop era. Thelonious Monk is still one of my favorites. So a lot of these people had their effect on me.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

Everybody cryin' mercy / When they don't know the meaning of the word.

The things that really matter don't mix with idle chatter.

Ever since the world ended, I don't go out as much

I have no idea what I'm doin'. I've never seen me.

I been getting good crowds. It only took 50 years.

I'm playin' music for a certain type of person. Fortunately, there are more and more of us. At least there are more comin' to see me than there were 30 years ago or so.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.

Life continues to flow even if you want to stop for a moment.

Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

You just have to take control of your own performance.

Who is his manager? Milton Bradley.

Close don't count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades.

The absence of temptation is the absence of virtue.

That's a weird way to torture yourself. Just watch a movie, over and over, that you hate. That's really funny - that's probably exactly what hell is like.

More inhumanity (to man) has been done by man himself than any other of nature's causes.

If you can believe, worry and anxiety will vanish

Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.