More and more as time has gone on, I realize that playing is really more about listening than it is about playing.

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.

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.

It is Jazz's very nature to change, to develop & adapt to the circumstances of its environment.

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.

The perceptual body that you are at the time of death ceases to be. It is not structured quite so tightly.

That is what you are. That's what you all are...All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

(I was) happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method.. ...rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.

Think joy, talk joy, practice joy, share joy, saturate your mind with joy, and you will have the time of your life today and every day all your life.

There is no such thing in life as normal.

I have so many playlists full of Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown.