I think that the melodic piece of the puzzle in music is the most esoteric and difficult to quantify.

Its more about conception and touch and spirit and soul than whether my hardware was in place.

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

One very fundamental thing has not changed and I realized that it will never change... is that I really need to go home and practice.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

Most guys at Berklee are going to wind up truck drivers.

More and more as time has gone on, I realize that playing is really more about listening than it is about playing.

Smokin' at the Half Note is the absolute greatest jazz-guitar album ever made. It is also the record that taught me how to play.

Learning to play is mostly about learning to hear, and learning to really listen deeply to sound in a musical way is a lifetime's worth of work.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

In today’s world, human desires far supersede human needs. Waste, as you can see, is the result of that disparity.

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.

Fate determines who comes into our lives Our attitude and actions determine who stays in our lives.

God does nothing but by prayer, and everything with it.

Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else." Then let's be quiet together.

Genius is expansive, irresistible, and irresistibly expansive. If it is in you, no cords can confine it.

If you can't go to secondary school, the boys get to go and the girls don't, you're locked into a cycle of poverty, because you don't have a chance.

I think it would be wrong to consider 'Ashes and Fire' a love album. The record is obsessed with time. I believe that there is a kinder view of the self on this record.

Learn to use your brains as deftly as your powder box, and then maybe you have a powder box and do not need.