Most blues don't have a beginning, middle, or end. You just cut a couple slices of blues.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I think I have more in common with a carpenter than you might think. We're putting things together.

God has a way of telling you when to change your strings.

You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.

When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.

Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged.

Go far from home and yo will have a long way back.

My son is racing his first 24-hour this year with Porsche.

It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

Without big data, you are blind and deaf and in the middle of a freeway.

Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.

You're not lonely when you're teaching, you're not quiet, you're laughing most of the time, you're having a wonderful time interacting with young people. It's the best fun in the world.

I collect Hot Wheels. I collect glass. I collect coins. And I collect cards.

The Internet provides a delivery system for pathological states of mind.