I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.

Seemed to me that drumming was the best way to get close to God.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

Man, as long as people want to hear Jazz, I'll give it to them.

All art is communication of the artists' ideas, sounds, thoughts; without that no one will support the artist.

Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things.

I'm motivated. The spirit hits me and I just keep going and don't stop. The more I play, the more I can invent, the more ideas come to me.

It's always Jazz. You can put a new dress on her, a new hat, but no matter what kind of clothes she's the same old broad.

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

A constant discomfort derives from this--writing these sentences, or any other for that matter--I am writing an ad for the war. With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.

Thank God I arrived the day before yesterday, the first of the month, at this port of San Diego, truly a fine one, and not without reason called famous.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

If you're not getting better in the summer, you're wasting your time.

I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs.

People may need something to celebrate. They need a context in which to celebrate things. They need something that fills the void that's left by the bankruptcy of religion and so forth.

All truths are old, and all that we have to do is recognize and utter them anew.

Our children need our presence, not our presents.

The U.S. has historically been the world's largest contributor to climate change.

Those who are used to a cage will weep for a cage.