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

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.

Moorcock's interlinked 'Eternal Champion' series is a constant source of enjoyment. Of its tragic hero incarnations, my favourite is 'Elric of Melnibone,' and the best book has to be 'Stormbringer.' And as for that other sword, Excalibur? Pah! Use it to spread your butter.

Many companies don't exist after 25 years. It's a rarity. Or if they do exist, they're like IBM, with a totally changing personality.

Rather than diminishing the idea of 'truly needing' a relationship - and trying to deny it, shame it, or talk ourselves out of it - why not just celebrate it? It's exactly what the world needs.

See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil... I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life.

The failure of The Cable Guy impacted my career. I had to start writing and acting again.

Somewhere behind the athlete you've become and the hours of practice and the coaches who have pushed you is a little girl who fell in love with the game and never looked back play for her.

I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff.

I love ghost stories but kind of left them alone after my teens and came back to it after playing Heathcliff in 'Wuthering Heights' on the radio.

That said, I should also add that I learned a great deal from being allowed in these privileged circles and am grateful for the opportunity to have worked closely with some of the most powerful and successful people in the business including Steven Spielberg and Ted Turner.

Does Facebook behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples' agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Facebook stream, or have other people do that for me?

Just keep going. Everybody gets better if they keep at it.

L.A.'s become so cosmopolitan in its casting and also in its world view.

What is divine? It is simply that which man has not been able to understand. Once you do, it loses its divinity.

Cheating in school is a form of self deception. We go to school to learn. We cheat ourselves when we coast on the efforts and scholarship of someone else.

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

I saw the original that Gela Babluani wrote and directed called '13 Tzameti,' and that was very interesting. I believe it was a French film, and I was just intrigued by the awkwardness; the off-beatness of the film really just grasped me.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes.

I'm constantly trying to find something that's different from me, whereas some actors do the same thing, again and again. That's not for me.

I live a sensible life. You know, I don't take on too much.

The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.

You know, the emotion - it comes in my art. The kind of person I am, I can deal with things, and I do and I can, but I'm not a crier.

How do you live a long life? Take a two mile walk every morning before breakfast.

It doesnt matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether Im a woman or a man.