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

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.

I learned real early why God gave us two ears and one mouth, because you’re supposed to listen twice as much as you talk.

Whenever a woman would come too close, I would cut her off. Part of that was vindictive – but that was totally subconscious.

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

I’ve always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, “Ain’t that the truth.”

If I don’t have a mother, I’ll let music be my mother.

Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing.

All the jazz guys had interracial relationships, and even the ladies did. Over the years, interracial relationships have been a hip, almost defiant thing, a way of saying “Nobody can put a boundary around me.”

I was married for 36 years but now I’m free.

You have to know that your real home is within.

I’m never in my life going to do a record that’s a tribute to myself. I don’t need it.

Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.

They say a blind hog will find the acorn one day.

When I was nine, I had this girlfriend and we used to have running races in the park. I wanted to be like Superman and fly in and rescue her.

I love every minute of fatherhood, staying up all night, changing nappies, kids crying, I find it really funny and inspiring. It connects you to the world in a new way.

I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak.

Lucky he who has been educated to bear his fate, whatsoever it may be, by an early example of uprightness, and a childish training in honor.

I’m quite comfortable looking at myself in movies, probably because I’ve been doing it for so long, since I was a kid. So I sort of watched myself grow up and go through adolescence, like, basically on camera.

Don’t you know I”m still standing better than I ever did. Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid. I’m still standing after all this time.

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men’s native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.