You don't have to worry about being a number one, number two, or number three. Numbers don't have anything to do with placement. Numbers only have something to do with repetition.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

When I have them working together, it's like a beautiful kaleidoscope.

For me, being an innovator doesn't mean being more intelligent, more rich, it's not a word, it's an action.

The idea is more important than the style you're playing in.

I don't try to please when I play. I try to cure.

Music has many uses and I think the most perfected use that music has is one of a healing quality.

Whatever you do, it's over when you do it - but first you have to do it.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we've forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We've separated music from life.

You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes.

In our age, the problems that needs to be solved are growing in number and business of life is overpowering

Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us.

Clarity clattered into my thoughts and brought about a satori, an enlightenment, if you will.

If you have a body, you are an athlete!

Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did.

A man's home is no longer his castle; it is no longer a place away from urgent tasks because the telephone breaches the walls with imperious demands.

Gospel songs to me are about the mansion in the sky, and washed in the blood of Christ's crimson blood, songs that are filled with biblical wording that's no longer understood by a lot of people.

I was always the first one to break. I'll admit it. I couldn't keep a straight face.

My parents were very loving, but disciplinarians.

I didn't hang any pictures in my office for a year because I thought that I would be jinxing myself and have to take them down the next day.