“My short answer would be that there is no greatest jazz musician of the century. Jazz, like any valid art form, finds its greatness in its expression of the human spirit, and, to me, this can’t be reduced to a contest.”

Art is self expression. If you are expressing someone else’s personality, that is not art.

Youre not going to drive me home? I asked. A waste of breath, since i knew her answer. Theres fog. Patchy fog. Vee grinned. Oh, boy. He is so on your mind. Not that i blame you. Personally, im hoping i dream about him tonight.

It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

One thing that I am sure of, and which I can answer truthfully, is that whatever the contingencies that may arise here, wherever I am there will be no communism.

And I think that’s reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

Maybe my life isn’t great. We don’t have all the answers. Look at it from my side.

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

Sometimes if you have a difficult decisin to make, just stall until the answer presents itself.