My affiliation with England is borne out by the fact that I do come back for periodic visits.

Perfect retention. I dont think I could do that-Ive never disciplined myself to do it.I suppose a lot of it is a question of discipline. Which improvisation is not.

Learn the rules and then break them in such a way as to exercise good taste.

I always tell people, it took me 10 minutes and 35 years in the business. I get tired of playing it ["Lullaby of Birdland"], but not of collecting the royalties.

When people ask me how is it I was a musician, I facetiously say that I'm a firm believer in reincarnation and in a previous life I was Johann Sebastian Bach's guide dog.

The way it works: The orchestra plays a few selections of its own and I terminate the first part of the programme on piano, usually with a movement from a Mozart concerto.

If you establish an identity, you build a monster-and thats right, youve got to live with it. Of course, you can enjoy it, too.

Can anybody be given creativity? No. Only equipment to develop it if it's in them in the first place.

You know, when you've established a certain thing, what can you do? You're stuck with it.

I don't like freedom jazz - I think it's void of roots and void of foundation.

In Braille you write your flat sign first and then your note.

As it turns out, that persistence is a requirement. Thus, he would tell me, you need the dark to show the light, so you shouldn't curse darkness. You needed death to define life.

Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name’s the motherof the ten thousand things.

We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we’re completely beside ourselves.

It's time we stopped ignoring the environment. Let's not let another election go by without making this a high priority.

Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams. All of them are different styles, but those are the songs that make the times. They're the songs that last through time.

Every news organization should ideally be as broadly representative as possible.

Nearly every understanding is gained by a painful struggle in which belief and unbelief are dramatically interwoven.

Ever since I was a kid, I've had an enormous interest in the sciences - everything from quantum physics to anthropology.

I think it's very rare, as an actor, that you get to a script, or an idea of a script, and you go, "Oh, I just have to do that!" It fell into place very quickly.

[In] my era everybody smoked and everybody drank and there was no drug use