I don't need much coaxing.

It would be really hard to get serious about anything political today unless it was a joke.

I don't enjoy traveling in America. I don't like the food, the cars. It is not exotic enough. It all tastes a bit like airline food.

There are times when what's happening in rock is the best music in the world, and there are times when there is nothing worthwhile at all.

Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.

Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker seemed so sophisticated and bad. I wanted to be like that.

When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.

I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

I write very slowly.

I got started when I was 3 years old because my father was a music teacher and my lessons were free. Instead of learning to walk, you learn to play the piano.

When you have 13 horns, and one is soloing, you have 12 people to play the richest, fullest chord you could ever imagine behind that solo.

One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.

I don't need much coaxing.

Listening is more important than anything else because that's what music is. Somebody is playing something and you're receiving it. It is sending and receiving.

I don't think you can ever regain your ignorance.

When you are studying Jazz best thing to do is listen to records & live music as much you can & absorb everything.

I can write absolutely anywhere. All I need is a laptop.

Winning the gold medal should have been the happiest day of my entire life, and it just wasn't. It felt like the saddest day of my life. Everyone was so angry with us, that Scott and I had fallen in love, because it was so unprofessional, and we were a disgrace and had betrayed everybody.

We need a President who is not afraid of complexity, who believes in an open and tolerant society, and who knows that the world can be made new again - and that President is Al Gore.

I like to go to work, and also, I don't have any kids. I don't have any hobbies. I don't like to travel. So going to work is kind of it.

To her the name of father was another name for love.

I think all kids think their parents are strict. My parents aren't superstrict, but they seem to be stricter than most. But even though it's like, 'Oh, gosh, I've gotta be in at this time,' they know what they're doing. I have great parents.

So I became a producer because I knew one of the reasons was they didn't do them the way I thought was right.

In particular I want to talk about natural black hair, and how it's not just hair. I mean, I'm interested in hair in sort of a very aesthetic way, just the beauty of hair, but also in a political way: what it says, what it means.

Circumstances are the rulers of the weak they are but the instruments of the wise.

Like Indiana Jones, I don't like snakes - though that might lead some to ask why I'm in politics.

Social struggles have been taking place throughout millennia, since human beings, by resorting to wars, were able to take hold of a surplus production to satisfy the essential needs of life.

I get a lot of comments from people that I'm just an ordinary bloke. They immediately feel they have a closer relationship with you; they relate to you.

Fitness is a luxury when you are busy!

It's only a few nutcases who do art for themselves, like Van Gogh.

There's nothing like simple spicy egg bhurji.

Each solstice is a domain of experience unto itself. At the Summer Solstice, all is green and growing, potential coming into being, the miracle of manifestation painted large on the canvas of awareness. At the Winter Solstice, the wind is cold, trees are bare and all lies in stillness beneath blankets of snow.

I think I'm going to end up as one terrific old lady!

The absence and suppression of justice can only open the way for extremists to exploit such a condition to perpetrate acts of violence against innocents.

Governor Isaac Stevens of the Washington Territory said there were a great many white people in our country, and many more would come; that he wanted the land marked out so that the Indians and the white man could be separated.

The real victim of bigotry is the white man who hides his weakness under his myth of superiority.

It is simply science fiction fantasy to say that, if you do not raise the debt ceiling, that everything is going to collapse.

Don't cut my throat, I may want to do that later myself.

It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.

I grew up on a farm, so there were rifles around. Every March around springtime, there's a big hunt that goes on, and you go out and hunt down all the pheasants. I actually never shot the pheasants; I'm not a big fan of killing animals myself.