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

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.

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.

To demonstrate the nature of one who would enter the kingdom is to use an illustration

To be free, a man must be free from his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else.

It is the things for which there is no evidence that are believed with passion.

Lovers, when they are no longer in love, find it very hard to break up.

I think Rihanna always looks so fresh and I'm like, "How do you do that? We all know how much pot you smoke!"

The attorney general should be enforcing the law, not policy.

To live your life without expectation-without the need for specific results-that is freedom. That is Godliness.

Aspiring minds must sometimes sustain loss.

You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.

At the beach, life is different. Time doesn't move hour to hour but mood to moment. We live by the currents, plan by the tides, and follow the sun.