If all you have is music, then you don't have music

Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that's required to sound like jazz. For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.'

The arts can open the door to the imagination, pushing the envelope of how peace can be created. It takes courage to take this kind of risk, and courage is what we all need to create a better world.

Music is interior decoration.

Go out on the stage as a human being and do not be afraid to show struggle in your music. It's a struggle in life and then struggle and then victory.

I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?

Composing is improvisation slowed down.

You're like the girl who left her shadow in the drawer, but when she went to get it, it wasn't there.

Your humanity is your instrument.

To hell with the rules. I'm going for the unknown.

I may be alone, but I am never lonely. I am always with my best friend, and that is me.

Prayer is to the soul what oxygen is to the heart life

Calm for too long begs the question of whether we're in an all-out pursuit of life, or we're all-out of the pursuit of life.

When we say forever, we are talking about a desire.

...British appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews [in the Holocaust] who might otherwise have found refuge in Palestine.

But recently it seems that each time I vote, I am being asked to compromise my conservative ideals and my commitment to the American taxpayer simply for the benefit of political gain.

...the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world's collective non-white man.

And what importance do I have in the courtroom of oblivion?

In this, photography is the same thing as love. When my gaze, diving into the sea as my subject, converges with the act of photography, hot sparks fly at the point of intersection.

Who would be so mocked with glory, or to live But in a dream of friendship, To have his pomp and all what state compounds But only painted, like his varnished friends?