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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I must have no fear of failure. It was my fear of failure that first kept me from attempting the Master Work.

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.

If skeptic can weakly force E, then he can force E.

In high tide or in low tide, I'll be by your side

A sign of a culture that has lost its faith - Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.

I don't have to be working on an album to record a song.

I didn't get much peace, but I heard in Norway that Russia might well become a huge market for tractors soon.

Revolt is not reform, and one revolutionary administration is not good government.

He was a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories.