“My mother told me I was blessed, and I have always taken her word for it. Being born of – or reincarnated from – royalty is nothing Like being blessed. Royalty is inherited from another human being; blessedness comes from God.”

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.

On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.

There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is to pay them money!

Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.

Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.

The artist must say it without saying it.

Self-discipline, as a virtue or an acquired asset, can be invaluable to anyone.

There is no art without intention.

Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.

I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline!

Sing sweet, but put a little dirt in it.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line

There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.

There are two kinds of worries – those you can do something about and those you can’t. Don’t spend any time on the latter.

There’s an inherent message in my work relating to recycling and the nature of value, but my artistic inspiration is fired by the qualities within the raw materials.

I inherited good skin from my mother, and I stay away from soap, which dries it out.

Character is not something we inherit. Character is something we have to wake up and build.

We can believe in the future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the earth is in balance.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

Every human being was born with an inherent gift, and that gift is their gift to humanity; they are supposed to serve humanity in the area of their gifting.

Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.