“My son is a hip-hop producer.”

It’s easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

A person’s age can be determined by the degree of pain he experiences when he comes in contact with a new idea.

I improvised my life along the way – I just moved step-by-step. And I knew that if I got better, something would happen.

Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.

I look back and say, “This must have been somebody else.” I am not going to tell you that when I was 4, I dreamed about all of this.

Greatness occurs when your children love you, when your critics respect you and when you have peace of mind.

Excellence isn’t an act, it’s a habit.

If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.

Editing while you’re writing is like strangling the baby in the crib.

Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.

A bad song, the three best singers in the world cannot save it, and that’s the bottom line.

When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.

I don’t deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn’t deserve that, either. So I’ll keep it.

You cannot get an A if you’re afraid of getting an F.

It’s amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don’t have anything else to do.

I was the most subtle person in the world.

The Constitution is a radical document, it is the job of the government to rein in people’s rights.

Your work is not your job. Your job is what they pay you to do; your work is what you were born to do.

Together we will build an America where hope is a new job with a paycheck, not a faded word on an old bumper sticker.

If you need to invoke your academic pedigree or job title for people to believe what you say, then you need a better argument.

I swear on my children’s lives that I never look at the statistics or look at beating anyone’s records. All I do is look to improve but not compete against any record. I want to win trophies and score goals because that’s my job as a forward.

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This is like believing that anyone who owns a scalpel is a surgeon.

I feel it’s my job to continue being a student of music if I want to continue being an artist and a producer of other artists. You have to keep filling your mind with other music. You have to be ahead of the curve.