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

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.

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!

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your magnificent indifference.

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.

I work too hard and don't play enough.

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

One ceases to be lonely only in recollection; perhaps that is why people read history.

If only Jesus' followers shared his personality. That one shift alone would correct so many of the ridiculous and horrifying things that pass for popular Christianity.

Usually the hard stuff you’re forced to do makes you learn a lot.

I play the guitar. I taught myself how to play the guitar, which was a bad decision... because I didn't know how to play it, so I was a shitty teacher. I would never have went to me.

A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what's going on inside of himself or herself ... lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.

You don't need to explain your dreams. They belong to you.

Let me not be so vain to think that I'm the sole author of my victories and a victim of my defeats.