When I grow up I want to be just like Benny Carter!

As a musician you have to keep one foot back in the past and have one foot forward into the future.

I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds.

Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that.

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

You can't steal a gift. Bird [Charlie Parker] gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.

I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be.

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

There have been two great revelations in my life: The first was bepop, the second was homeopathy.

Where there's no mutual respect, there's trouble!

The perfection of loneliness is you can do whatever you want by yourself.

The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.

We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind. In the faith that looks through death, in years that bring the philosophic mind.

By living up to their calling, women will succeed in guaranteeing a proper recognition of the unique value of femininity and its crucial mission in the world.

Every man loves and admires his own country because it produced him.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

Beauty is in the behind of the beholder!

[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.