Records used to be documents, but now record companies want product.

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it's like the human voice.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

Other than conversation, no other art form can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction like Jazz.

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. they are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence.

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won't come out.

I practiced saxophone eight hours a day for the first two years I played.

Crying is good for the soul. It means something needs to be released. And if you don't release the something, it just weighs you down until you can hardly move.

Music is the weapon in the war against unhappiness.

Out of Box” is a metaphor that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective.

When I stood there, looking out the window at the raindrops and thinking of everything I lost, I forgot everything I have. When I remembered the things I have, I forgot I lost anything at all.

Call me a proud American, if you want, but I truly believe that no other nation on Earth possesses the capabilities to put on a more powerful display of underwater mermaid patriotism.

I frowned at him. "Isn't sarcasm the opiate of the masses?""You're thinking of religion, " he replied. "Sarcasm is the Xanax of the morally bereft.

The idea of giving someone something that I got, that makes me feel sad.

There are people who believe in expanding the welfare state across the spectrum of races and ethnicities and creeds.

The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species.

I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.