“He sounded to me like he’s supposed to be the savior of jazz. Sometimes people speak as though someone asked them a question. Well, no one asked him a question.”

We’re not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got ’em, so they can keep ’em.

Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.

I never thought that the music called “jazz” was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.

Americans don’t like any form of art, man. All they like to do is make money. They don’t like me, Sammy Davis, or anybody else. They don’t like nothing. They just like Sammy because he can make ’em a lot of money.

I can’t write anything for myself. I can write when I hear like [John] Coltrane play something; I used to write chords and stuff for him to play in one bar. I can write for other people, but I don’t never write for myself.

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.

I always listen to what I can leave out.

Some day I’m gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up.

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

In improvisation, there are no mistakes.

If I hear a song like “Time After Time.” I’m sittin’ there lookin’ at video and Cindy Lauper comes on singin’ this song. I said, “God damnnnnn!”

Certain drummers drop time, and I like to play on top of the beat.

[Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know.

It takes you years to learn how to play like yourself.

It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.

Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get.

In this world we must help one another.

Which is the greater merit, to enlighten the human race, which remains forever, or to save one’s fatherland, which is perishable?

What a fine comedy this world would be if one did not play a part in it.

The best doctor is the one you run to and can’t find.

Some say an army of horsemen, or infantry, A fleet of ships is the fairest thing On the face of the black earth, but I say It’s what one loves.

One of the worst things you can die with is potential.