Im always trying to find connections between things. That art is the juxtaposition of a lot of things that seem unrelated but add up to something recognizable.

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.

At some point people either had to throw off the wounds of their childhood or go through life permanently crippled

The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other.

I don't tear down. I prefer to build up.

We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now.

Purity is when there is no anxiety, no worry, no thinking.

Minds that are great and free, should not on fortune pause: 'Tis crown enough to virtue still, her own applause.

I was a terrible father. The most I ever did for my children was to teach them chess. At least they got that.

All great humorists are sad... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest - the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.

[C]ontemporary liberalism stands on a foundation of assumptions and ideas integral to the larger fascist movement.