“Food makes my mind sluggish.”

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.

You can’t eat a winner’s plaque.

Bebop didn’t have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn’t even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging – but they weren’t sweet.

If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!

What’s swinging in words? If a guy makes you pat your foot and if you feel it down your back, you don’t have to ask anybody if that’s good music or not. You can always feel it.

I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.

With “We Are The World,” I can’t even eat when I watch that on television. If I’m eatin’ some food, I have to put it down. I feel very strongly about that.

Music is the framework around the silence.

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning… Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

I think the greatest sound in the world is the human voice.

Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves. But if you be afraid of your touchiness, you must ask pardon, mind, when she comes in.

You are my day and night. The first thought when I wake, the last thing on my mind; before I slip into the moons starry sky.

You can make hell out of heaven and heaven out of hell. It’s all in the mind.

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go.

Everything is ecstasy inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind it is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.

God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.

As is your sort of mind, So is your sort of search: You will find what you desire.