My juices needed restoring. I needed a sabbatical from the record business.

To play today in London, next week in Madrid and the week after that in Warsaw is a bit better than playing Newark and Baltimore and Philadelphia. I've been doing that for 20 years.

Amsterdam must have more than a million people. But the only area where jazz is really profitable and successful in an economic sense is in Japan. That's because they haven't been exposed enough.

Sponsors and networks will really go all out and simply evaluate people on the basis of talent.

Jazz is America's own. It is played and listened to by all peoples - in harmony together. Pigmentation differences have no place... as in genuine democracy, only performance counts.

If you don't get substantially what you want, be ready to walk. And don't look back.

There are very few groups that really stay together. The leaders of groups make enough money to be able to afford to work a maximum of 35-40 weeks a year.

If I were to put on Barbra Streisand and Duke Ellington, one might say the combination isn't good.

I don't say that the supposed Civil Rights development is a myth, but it's a matter of dealing with reality. It's purely peripheral and, in many cases, it's just a facade.

Germany is probably the richest country in Western Europe. Yet they wouldn't take any television with Duke and Ella, their reaction being that people weren't interested in it.

The whole reason for Jazz at the Philharmonic was to take it to places where I could break down segregation.

Dear Jesus! you are so precious to me. I thank God that even if I went through so much loss in life, I still have you.

...he believed in God and he believed that when the human is still, the Divine speaks to it, because it is its own.

The minute your group gets so big you don't know anybody in it and they don't know you, there's hell to pay.

You will never become a hero if you keep waiting for someone else to bring a cape for you.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

You disappear so completely into your head sometimes," he said. "I wish I could follow you.

I own motorized bar stools.

We will never be the women God wants us to be if our hearts are continually chasing after human approval.

I mean I can do it when I'm very relaxed, and with good friends, then I think I can be amusing.

The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought.