My experience is that relationships can be difficult, hard work. I love to be in a relationship.
Your mother’s heartbeat is the first sound you ever hear and your own heartbeat is the last.
One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It’s the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It’s the first thing you hear when you’re born — or before you’re born — and it’s the last thing you hear.
There's a way of playing safe, there's a way of using tricks and there's the way I like to play which is dangerously where you're going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven't created before.
Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.
Art may not have the power to change the course of history, but it can provide a perspective on historical events that needs to be heard, even if it's seldom heeded. After all the temporary influences that once directed the course of history have vanished, great art survives and continues to speak to each generation.
Kinship doesn't come from skin color. It's in your soul and your mind.
Gold is worshipped in all climates, without a single temple, and by all classes, without a single hypocrite.
Celibacy is exhausting.
People will buy snake oil from anybody who seems to be selling it in a persuasive way.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.