“If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.

My ego only needs a good rhythm section.

Do not be afraid of errors. There are no errors.

Drummers – sometimes they play and they listen. And that little listen takes a speck away from the right tempo.

Don’t be afraid of mistakes – There are none.

White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything – you know what I mean?

People will go for anything they don’t understand if it’s got enough hype.

You can’t compete with Sweets’ sound and time feel. It’s impossible.

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.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown

The path of sorrow, and that path alone, leads to the land where sorrow is unknown.

I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.

There is nothing to compare with the courage of ordinary people whose names are unknown and whose sacrifices pass unnoticed.

I want to thank all the women who have worn my clothes, the famous and the unknown, who have been so faithful to me and given me so much joy.

I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.

If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.

Humanity lies in man’s capacity to question the known and imagine the unknown.