“Gray skies are just clouds passing over.”

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

I don’t need time, I need a deadline.

There are 2 rules in life: Number 1- Never quit. Number2- Never forget rule number 1.

My biggest kick in music -playing or writing- is when I have a problem. Without a problem to solve, how much interest do you take in anything?

There is no art when one does something without intention.

Now I can say loudly and openly what I have been saying to myself on my knees.

Simplicity is a most complex form.

Be a number one yourself. And not a number two somebody else.

Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat. I think that people who don’t dance, or who never did dance, don’t really understand the beat. I know musicians who don’t and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don’t want it.

Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.

Problems are chances for us to do our best.

I don’t believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.

Critics have their purposes, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

This habit of reading, I make bold to tell you, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle’s eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.

we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

Time, as he passes us, has a dove’s wing, Unsoil’d, and swift, and of a silken sound.

Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.

I couldn’t stand here, hanging on, when the very thing i held disappeared more with each passing day.

The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development.