I write very slowly.

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.

Happiness is dependent on self-discipline. We are the biggest obstacles to our own happiness. It is much easier to do battle with society and with others than to fight our own nature.

Abstract knowledge is always useful, sooner or later.

Turning a breakup into a break-over We want women to know that as bad as it can be, it can also be an opportunity to reinvent yourself.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

Fundamentally, we have to recognize that Iran is not a partner.

I love myself and I am a good person.

It's good for actors to confront those things we have to act: panic, pain and death.

Next to coming to a good understanding with a new mistress, I love a quarrel with an old one.

I grew up moving around because my dad was in the Air Force - I think this has carried over into my work in that I like to hop around from one medium to another.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

I'm an Old Media guy. I don't have a website; I don't Twitter. I love magazines, yet I love video games. It's a strange disconnect.

I had never really pictured myself working in children's ministries. I always figured I would be more comfortable with maybe teens or adult ministries.

I shot all my stuff on 'Arrested Development' in one day, and was brought into a really well-oiled machine. 'Cause it was the last season, and they were wrapping up a lot of stuff because they knew at that point that they weren't coming back. There seemed to be kind of a freedom, and certainly the cast had a great amount of camaraderie.

I just remember Bruce Lee blowing my mind on the screen, and I thought to myself, 'That's what I want to do for a living when I'm older.' Bruce Lee was so magnetic and charismatic and held the screen so well.

I don't worry about terrorism. I was married for two years.

I love the notion of a dude sitting there with an untuned guitar tapping his foot and just singing his passion out; that's what got me into music in the first place.

But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it's by way of heartbreak, sometimes it's by way of injustice, sometimes it's by way of fate. There's an infinite number of ways to examine it.

I didn't know who the hell I was. I was whoever they wanted me to be.

Diana Wynne Jones' excellent book 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland' is a compendium of the sort of lazy writing that has given fantasy fiction - especially the sub-section that features elves and dwarves and other Tolkienesque elements - a bad name.

I am an anthologist, you see. I sort of make anthologies for people.

I think I am incredibly generous with how much I give to my projects, but that's my generosity with the job.

The school holidays were always an exciting time in the Brownlee household. This was the opportunity for my brother Alistair and me to escape from the classroom and enjoy the great outdoors. Our childhood was jam-packed with fun family games and activities.

Brooklyn has become a brand and it represents something and there is this tension between the old and new world.

I bleed Dodger blue!