“Simplicity is a most complex form.”

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don’t want it.

Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.

Problems are chances for us to do our best.

I don’t believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.

Critics have their purposes, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

Tomorrow is in the wings waiting for you to sound her entrance fanfare.

I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.

Yet, every time God’s children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened.

New music? Hell, there’s been no new music since Stravinsky.

If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!

If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.

Love is supreme and unconditional; like is nice but limited.

Gray skies are just clouds passing over.

There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it’s successful; if it doesn’t it has failed.

Death I believe has many forms. It is a shapeshifter. But amongst all the forms it has, love is my favorite.

Money can’t buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Envy, like a false mirror, distorts the symmetry of the sweetest form.

Strength is formed in the womb of adversity.

Everybody knows when lightening strikes the earth a woman is formed.