The first choral music I remember hearing was Handel's 'Messiah' when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir broadcast it over the radio.

Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

Damn it, when I'm bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic-take it or leave it.

Kinship doesn't come from skin color. It's in your soul and your mind.

It's like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.

The secret of a great melody is a secret.

I'm always hoping for the nights that are inspired where you almost have an out of body experience

Jazz is about freedom within discipline.

Don't be a perfectionist... leave that to the classical musicians.

We don't know the power that's within our own bodies

Anytime you testify you have some amount of increase or the other, God does not want you to get satisfied

Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.

I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.

Aristocracy is that form of government in which education and discipline are qualifications for suffrage and office holding.

Being a stranger was like being dead, and brought to mind how, in a book he had read that most folks misunderstood one common state: The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.

Normal: lacking in taste, compassion, understanding, kindness, and ordinary human decency.

Let him that sows the serpent's teeth not hope to reap a joyous harvest. Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, its own avenging angel,--dark misgivings at the inmost heart.

Only by examining our personal biases can we truly grow as artists; only by cultivating empathy can we truly grow as people.

It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.