“The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.”

I don’t need time, I need a deadline.

There are 2 rules in life: Number 1- Never quit. Number2- Never forget rule number 1.

My biggest kick in music -playing or writing- is when I have a problem. Without a problem to solve, how much interest do you take in anything?

There is no art when one does something without intention.

Now I can say loudly and openly what I have been saying to myself on my knees.

Simplicity is a most complex form.

Be a number one yourself. And not a number two somebody else.

Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat. I think that people who don’t dance, or who never did dance, don’t really understand the beat. I know musicians who don’t and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating.

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.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?

The considerations upon which expectations of prospective yields are based are partly existing facts which we can assume to be known more or less for certain, and partly future events which can only be forecasted with more or less confidence.

Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free-enterprise economy is the source of our middle-class prosperity.

We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.

The problem with America today is that too many people know too much about not enough.

Not a tenth of us who are in business are doing as well as we could if we merely followed the principles that were known to our grandfathers.

He belonged to that army known as invincible in peace, invisible in war.

I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.