“If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I’d spend it choking a white man. I’d do it nice and slow.”

Some day I’m gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up.

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

In improvisation, there are no mistakes.

If I hear a song like “Time After Time.” I’m sittin’ there lookin’ at video and Cindy Lauper comes on singin’ this song. I said, “God damnnnnn!”

Certain drummers drop time, and I like to play on top of the beat.

[Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know.

It takes you years to learn how to play like yourself.

It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.

You can’t eat a winner’s plaque.

Bebop didn’t have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn’t even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging – but they weren’t sweet.

If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!

What’s swinging in words? If a guy makes you pat your foot and if you feel it down your back, you don’t have to ask anybody if that’s good music or not. You can always feel it.

I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.

With “We Are The World,” I can’t even eat when I watch that on television. If I’m eatin’ some food, I have to put it down. I feel very strongly about that.

Music is the framework around the silence.

After a slow buildup, people become convinced that they have known about the brand forever.

If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

And I have always believed, that it is in our slow exhalation, where the sense of this deep spiritual energy resides.

Dope never helped anybody sing better or play music better or do anything better. All dope can do for you is kill you – and kill you the long, slow, hard way.

I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.

People move on after a breakup – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. The thing you have to remember is that it was over for him before he ended it, so he had a head start on the process of getting over it.

When I get old and slow down I want to look behind me and see all the fire and the wreckage and no stone left unturned.

The middle class, in any society, plays the role of graphite rods in nuclear reactors: they slow down the reaction and, if it weren’t for them, the reactor would explode.