Play what you know and then play above that

Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

If you sacrifice your art because of some woman, or some man, or for some color, or for some wealth, you can't be trusted.

For the human memory is short, and even when we write it in stone we quickly forget and the stones crumble and even those stones then forget.

There is only one big thing-desire. And before it when it is big all is little.

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.

I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.

Swans live wherever there is water, and leave the place where water dries up; let not a man act so - and comes and goes as he pleases.

I don't play golf. I have more fun singing and dancing.

I was having such a hard time when I made Sylvia. I gave everything I had for that role. It's one or two or three things I'm most proud of in terms of my work. But it was very dark.

Since we do not take a man on his past history, we do not refuse him because of his past history. I never met a man who was thoroughly bad. There is always some good in him if he gets a chance.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

I regret the whole worlds that will never come into existence, the children, the grandchildren, all the human possibilities that never were and never will be.