Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

If you sacrifice your art because of some woman, or some man, or for some color, or for some wealth, you can't be trusted.

A true god surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough... [or inspired] books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror.

A great philosophy is not a philosophy without reproach it is philosophy without fear.

There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

To show the world what long experience gains, requires not courage, though it calls for pains; but at life's outset to inform mankind is a bold effort of a valiant mind.

There are moral religious people and moral secular people, immoral religious people and immoral secular people.

I generally write a first draft that's pretty lean. Just get the story down.

I will say the most raw joy I've experienced reading has probably come from the times I've been reading with my little boys.

Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.

Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure; Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.