“The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.”

The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want.

I’d say the main way people get into terrible financial trouble is just to spend too much money relative to their income, and that is an endemic problem in the United States of America, and that’s the kind of thing that should be taught about in schools.

I always assumed scientists were free to ask any question, pursue any line of inquiry without fear or reprisal.

When I seemed to be irritable or sad, my father would quote the learned Dr. Knight, and then say, ‘Just go to sleep.’ Like all smart aleck kids, I thought the advice was silly. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized just how smart Knight was.

I am so in love with just lying in bed listening to Mozart.

We are not supposed to be all equal. Let’s just forget that. We are supposed to have equal rights under law. If we do that, we have done enough.

My ‘thing’ is that I just lie in my immense bed and look out the window at the skyline over Virginia and the sky and the airplanes coming into Reagan. I really love doing that.

I think a snob would be a person who thinks he is entitled; he has good things in his life and is entitled to them.

If we are just specks of dust hit by lightning, if we have no spark of God in us, why not just take whatever we can and devil take the hindmost? I mean, we are fools not to do that if there is no right or wrong.

I don’t consider an actor a star if he’s paid $20 million and grimaces in front of the camera and has a stunt man stand in for him. They may be fine actors, but they’re not role models.

I’m out and about meeting people all day long. And I’m very friendly; I talk to just about everybody I meet.

It doesn’t bother me a bit when people say, ‘Merry Christmas’ to me. I don’t think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it.

Yes, Americans can still get credit for cars and trucks and refrigerators, and those businesses are doing well. But just try to get a home loan now.

The people who did the collateralized mortgage obligations, sold them to pension funds, then sold them short, then bought credit default swap insurance on them, are just amazing. They are a law unto themselves.

It is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated… it is finished when it surrenders.

If there are finer beings than German short hairs, I don’t know what they are. In their eyes is peace.

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another themeM

I’ve been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

Jazz brought this sense of democracy where four guys come together and your name may be on the marquee, but in this moment, when you’re the soloist, it’s you, and we follow you. We follow you.

You have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the Blues.

Once you discover that you can, then you must.

Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.

Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists.

I became a jazz fan quite early and never went off the path thereafter.