Let my children have music! Let them hear live music.

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

I never heard my music played the way I heard it in my head.

I am Charles Mingus, half black man, not even white enough to pass for nothing but black. I am Charles Mingus, a famed jazzman, but not famed enough to make a living in this society.

I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.

My music is evidence of my souls will to live.

If Charlie Parker were a Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

Making the complicated simple is true creativity.

Bach is how buildings got taller. It's how we got to the moon.

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.

I don't know why, but there's always the part of you, the part that hides in the shadows protecting the self-destruct button, that doesn't ever want to leave the dark behind.

The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.

I am a sportsman and not a politician. I am a sportsman and will always remain one. I am not going to enter politics giving up cricket, which is my life. I will continue to play cricket.

If anyone would have been paying serious attention to my puppet shows, I would have been sent to therapy very young.

Dharma doesn't necessarily mean following a mundane and boring life. It means a life of high adventure, not a life of endless, boring repetition.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

You are designed by God not to blend in, but to stand out

Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are.

Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals.