You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it's like the human voice.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

Other than conversation, no other art form can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction like Jazz.

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. they are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence.

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won't come out.

I practiced saxophone eight hours a day for the first two years I played.

You know, when I'm playing, I think of myself in front of the Wailing Wall with a saxophone in my hands, and I'm davening, I'm really telling it to the Wall.

If thy daughter marry well thou hast found a son if not thou hast lost a daughter.

Laughter nibbled at my lips like tiny fish in warm water.

Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.

Learn to bear bravely changes of fortune.

Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless.

Where there is love of medicine, there is love of humankind.

The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.

I don't need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Trusting yourself is trusting the wisdom that created you.

Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind.