“You’ve got to find a way of saying it without saying it.”

I like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

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.

Don’t steamroll your way into a conversation before establishing any relational credibility.

The only way I’m interested in having a baby is the old-fashioned way.

One way or the other, if you want to find reasons why you shouldn’t keep on, you’ll find ‘em. The obstacles are all there; there are a million of ‘em.

If you try to deliver a funny line in a funny way, it comes out as wacky and you ruin the scene.

But I didn’t think about this beforehand. I just went ahead and did it, and that’s the way it turned out. So I guess there are lots of paradoxes which I’ll leave for other people to unscramble.

I would like to help my people in any way I can. It’s difficult times in Pakistan and we all have to help.

Use all the skills you have in relation to others – and that way we can do anything.

It was one of the founders of SDS and that chief writer of the Port Huron Statement, which is still worth reading. It’s kind of the Bernie Sanders campaign document in a funny way.