You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

I think I have more in common with a carpenter than you might think. We're putting things together.

God has a way of telling you when to change your strings.

When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.

If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience.

That which endures forever

A small fact:You are going to die....does this worry you?

Angling is an innocent cruelty.

Here's my problem. On Valentine's Day the flowers are wilting and so am I.

No matter what, it is very tricky and difficult just to be a good parent at all. I have a lot of help. And for that I'm very grateful.

You, too, will someday die, perhaps under inconvenient circumstances, at a time when you do not particularly wish to, and for causes that you cannot yet predict.

There's really one character for every actor. The voyage is to find that one character.

Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; 'tis in us, and planted in our bowels; and the mere fact that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick, renders us more hard to be cured.

I can't deliver lines, but I can talk about food all night long.

The worst thing that can happen to Russia is indifference in the West - that is, if it were interested in nothing but oil and gas.