I'm very glad to have met you. I like your playing very much.

Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you.

Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.

You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.

Don't be afraid, just play the music.

Once I could play what I heard inside me, that's when I was born.

I don't care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would never have written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker would have never played anything but swing music.

If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom.

They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

Nothing seems to me more tragic than the pressures we put on artists to do what we think we'll like, and our refusal to prize what is most ornery and special about them.

Some people are aware of everything that is going on everywhere at every moment in their lives.

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

Nice teeth is a turn on for me. If you open your mouth and it looks like a battle of epic proportions, I don't like it.

We do not believe in immortality because we can't prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.

Pure Christlike love flowing from true righteousness can change the world.

I remember when I was a little boy my father didn't love me; he couldn't. He loved my older brother but he couldn't love me somehow, at least not in a way I could understand it.

Invention is almost the only literary labour which blindness cannot obstruct.

I think I don't view myself as an author. I view myself as a person. I view anything as part of being a person, so I feel okay with "marketing" or other things like that.

There are no mistakes only opportunities.