“Well, I tell you. the first chorus, I plays the melody. The second chorus, I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus, I routines.”

I do believe that my whole success goes back to that time I was arrested as a wayward boy at the age of thirteen. Because then I had to quit running around and began to learn something. Most of all, I began to learn music.

I warm up at home. I hit the stage, I’m ready, whether it’s rehearsal or anything.

What we play is life.

I was determined to play my horn against all odds, and I had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

Music is life itself. What would this world be without good music? No matter what kind it is.

All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

I never want to be anything more than I am; what I don’t have, I don’t need.

There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.

The first time I heard Jack Teagarden on the trombone, I had goose pimples all over.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

Round thoughts which owe their birth, To thee, and to the humble spot, Where chance has fixed thy lowly lot.

Hate gets going, it goes round, it gets older and tighter and older and tighter, until it holds a person inside it like a fist holds a stick.

I have been very fortunate in that I’m not doing all network shows or all cable shows, television has really become a year-round process in the way that it’s made.

When you have arrived at your country house and have saluted your household, you should make the rounds of the farm the same day, if possible; if not, then certainly the next day.

Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.

It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact.

Perhaps a day might come when there would be at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labors.