“I warm up at home. I hit the stage, I’m ready, whether it’s rehearsal or anything.”

I do believe that my whole success goes back to that time I was arrested as a wayward boy at the age of thirteen. Because then I had to quit running around and began to learn something. Most of all, I began to learn music.

What we play is life.

I was determined to play my horn against all odds, and I had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

Well, I tell you. the first chorus, I plays the melody. The second chorus, I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus, I routines.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

Music is life itself. What would this world be without good music? No matter what kind it is.

All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

I never want to be anything more than I am; what I don’t have, I don’t need.

There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.

The first time I heard Jack Teagarden on the trombone, I had goose pimples all over.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

The lowest stage of humanity is experienced when the individual must labour for a small pittance of wages from others.

Once you are pregnant, there is no if. That child, though tiny and in an early stage of development, already exists!

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.

Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols, for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.

Singing for stage, if you don’t hear yourself, that’s when you push, and that’s when you can hurt your voice sometimes. So if I can hear myself in my ear, it really helps me to find that balance of how loud I needed to be singing.

I don’t think I write differently when I’m writing a screenplay, as opposed to a stage play or a teleplay. Maybe if I were in a film class and there was time to think about it, we could point out differences.

I began to work the stage and get the audience into it. I also learned how to have fun out there. It is something I will never forget.

Passions are merely ideas in their initial stage.