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

We stole a box of honey jars one time and went out in the woods and took care of the whole box. I don’t think I touched honey again for 20 years. I never wanted to see honey again.

Prince a true artist in every sense of the world. Gone way too soon.

What happens when you get a big break and you haven’t prepared yourself? That becomes the biggest mistake you’ve ever made. I see it happen all the time.

It’s easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

A person’s age can be determined by the degree of pain he experiences when he comes in contact with a new idea.

I improvised my life along the way – I just moved step-by-step. And I knew that if I got better, something would happen.

Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.

I look back and say, “This must have been somebody else.” I am not going to tell you that when I was 4, I dreamed about all of this.

Greatness occurs when your children love you, when your critics respect you and when you have peace of mind.

Excellence isn’t an act, it’s a habit.

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.

I don’t like food that’s too carefully arranged; it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture I’d buy a painting.

Speak the things you hope for. Then rearrange how you do the things to make them happen.

The smaller you strip things down, the more you depend on the songs and yourself, as opposed to arrangements.

Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.

The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.

The hardest part of a missionary career is to maintain regular, prayerful Bible study. Satan will always find you something to do, when you ought to be occupied about that – if it is only arranging a window blind!

Anything played wrong twice in a row is the beginning of an arrangement.

I believe that forgiving them is god’s function, our job is to arrange the meeting.