Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that.

As a musician you have to keep one foot back in the past and have one foot forward into the future.

I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds.

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

You can't steal a gift. Bird [Charlie Parker] gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.

I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be.

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

There have been two great revelations in my life: The first was bepop, the second was homeopathy.

Where there's no mutual respect, there's trouble!

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your magnificent indifference.

Only those willing to truly risk everything will gain everything. No person ever rose to greatness without the willingness to lose it all.

Screw the shops

I will always fight for a woman's right to choose and the right to privacy. Reproductive issues are medical related issues and they should be kept private between a woman and her doctor.

But the biggest fake of the year, Paul Begala's last smile

Not a good night for President Obama. He lost elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and he's not doing good in Afghanistan either.

Outside the practice of science itself, scientists have sometimes been the greatest offenders in adhering to dogmatic ideas against all the evidence.

Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.

There would not be a perfect likeness of God in the universe if all things were of one grade of being.

The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.