People should not feel intimidated by received wisdom. You have to discover it yourself. If I tell you that Armstrong is great, it's meaningless; you have to hear it.

Jazz is for joy. It's for euphoria, it's for emotion, and anguish, and excitement, and all of the joys that great art can produce, and if it loses that, then it's lost everything.

You've got to have a gimmick if your band sucks.

I hate the idea of turning jazz into homework assignments. I would never have a quiz saying, "Who's the clarinetist on the Hot Five?" I don't care. If you like the clarinetist, you'll know who it is.

Bing Crosby said that Armstrong is "the beginning and the end of music in America," and he wasn't far wrong.

Humility is a very important trait in a critic.

If you're genuinely candid and expressive then you're never wrong, even when you are wrong.

What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?

I'm as wicked as Hitler's first born, cause of me, lot of old ladies purses gone.

In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.

My mom was always making me clothes. We'd go to the fabric store, pick out patterns, and it was a creative process. I heard that word a lot growing up: creative.

The art of negotiation is perhaps what most deeply distinguishes man from the animals, and it is this art and this will to negotiate that has brought man forward, elevated him beyond the animals.

The more we consume, acquire, and elevate our status, the harder it is to stay happy.

I like playing in other projects.

Non-violence is not a quality to be evolved or expressed to order. It is an inward growth depending for sustenance upon intense individual effort.

I work hard, like I'm sure everyone else does, and I'm very honest with the work I do.

The skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting.