When you're with another tea smoker it makes you feel a special kinship.

Every time I close my eyes blowing that trumpet of mine, I look right into the heart of good old New Orleans. It has given me something to live for.

Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.

Don't do nothing halfway, else you find yourself dropping more than can be picked up.

What we play is life.

I got a simple rule about everybody. If you don't treat me right - shame on you.

If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it.

Each man has his own music bubbling up inside him.

And I think to myself what a wonderful world. Oh, yeah.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original.

Cemeteries can be creepy, creepy, ‘specially at night.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.

Wars do not always begin with an abrupt, cymbal-crash rupture of conditions properly characterized as peace. There can be almost seamlessly incremental transitions.

For me exotic means beaches, palm trees and sand and frolicking in the ocean

He only who gave life has a power over it.

Please remember we all come from the same one and we will all return to that one, so there is no reason for fighting.