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

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.

Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

If you’re not nervous then you’re not paying attention.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

If you don’t know what to play, play nothing.

When the band plays fast, you play slow; when the band plays slow, you play fast.

In high school I was best in music class on the trumpet, but the prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

If you’re going to drop behind, you have to keep it there.

My future starts when I wake up every morning.

There are no wrong notes.

When kids don’t learn about their own heritage in school, they just don’t care about school… But you won’t see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

I used to enjoy all the white bands when I was a kid listening to the radio. But the record companies, they take music and label it – like, they say “rock”. Because the white singers can’t sound like James Brown, they call him “soul”. They’ve been doing that for years. That’s the prejudice crap.

[Louis Armstrong] was the only musician who ever lived, who can’t be replaced by someone.

There’s not like this separate caste system where it’s like, “I’m the musician, you’re the audience. Never the two shall meet.” It was a case where it was like, “Hey, you know what? I’m on your level, man.”

I’m not a musician, I just play bass.

I didn’t follow the standard rules of bass playing, and many musicians on many different instruments who became noteworthy for their unique or particular style did a very similar thing.

Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts.

Historically, musicians know what it is like to be outside the norm – walking the high wire without a safety net. Our experience is not so different from those who march to the beat of different drummers.

Bob Dylan is quite a songwriter, and a great singer and musician. I won’t bother with comparing myself to him, but I will say that I heard his records at a very young age and I still listen to all his records.

I didn’t write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn’t.