“When you’re over the hill, that’s when you pick up speed.”

If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.

Editing while you’re writing is like strangling the baby in the crib.

Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.

A bad song, the three best singers in the world cannot save it, and that’s the bottom line.

When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.

I don’t deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn’t deserve that, either. So I’ll keep it.

You cannot get an A if you’re afraid of getting an F.

My son is a hip-hop producer.

It’s amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don’t have anything else to do.

I was the most subtle person in the world.

The relationship with a producer and an artist is really special. It’s got to be love and respect, amazing mutual respect for each other, because that’s what makes a good record.

I’m a tremendous believer and supporter in hip-hop and rap.

Not one ounce of my self worth depends on your acceptance of me.

I chose the trombone because the trombone players in the marching band got to be up front with the majorettes (because of the slides) and I loved that!

Billy Strayhorn wrote Multicolored Blue. Billy to me is the boss of the arrangers.

You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.

When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.

You can take a kid out of Rosengård, but you can never take Rosengård out of that kid.

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.

Men talk of heaven, – there is no heaven but here; Men talk of hell, – there is no hell but here; Men of hereafters talk and future lives, – O love, there is no other life – but here.

I’m not glorifying it at all, I’m just basically telling you that sometimes I have suicidal thoughts. And maybe I should seek help, or maybe it’s not that deep.

There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.

Once your awareness becomes a flame, it burns up the whole slavery that the mind has created.