Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.

I'm an exhibitionist, I was an exhibitionist as a kid.

When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one of the nuns discovered this phenomenon and I was actually sent around from classroom to classroom to do the whole thing.

If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience.

By the mid-70s, I wanted to get out of the business. I was tired anyway.

There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.

They basically said that if I didn't show up for school they'd mark me present, they wouldn't send the truant officer after me. At 16 I enrolled in something called continuing education. Once a month I'd go out to Jamaica, but I didn't take it seriously.

If there was ever any truth to the trickle-down theory, the only evidence of it I've ever seen was in that period of 1960 to 1965. All of sudden they were handing out major label recording contracts like they were coming in Cracker Jack boxes.

I don't think I went a year or so without a record between 1959 and 1979, sometimes two.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

I think I have more in common with a carpenter than you might think. We're putting things together.

Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.

Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four Strong Winds. It's a wonderful song.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

I'm a very, very stubborn man.

You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.

In the early 1970s. 1971, '72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren't signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had been pretty much been getting out of that for some time before that.

Most blues dont have a beginning middle or end. You just cut a couple slices of blues.

Both politicians and journalists face situations which strain their honesty and humanity. My opinion is that politicians on the average stand up somewhat better than journalists.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

It was a department where you had honesty and integrity stamped right on you when you came into the Los Angeles Police Department. If you violated that, or if you were a dishonest cop, you were terrible. We got rid of you as quickly as possible.

I like honesty and fair play.

A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all men can be honest, and should be honest himself.

Industry, economy, honesty, and kindness form a quartet of virtues that will never be improved upon.

I believe honesty comes across in music because for people that music isn't just something to dance to. For people for whom music is something that they feel, they understand what I'm talking about.

Confidence... thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

Honesty is very sexy.

The important things are children, honesty, integrity and faith.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

TV is a major force in our lives - a FORCE. It must be handled very carefully, both its censure and its artistic honesty.

Living in Washington, you can't take politics too seriously. I draw the line at honesty. I have no time for political hacks who say things they don't believe because they get paid to.

The greatest truth is honesty, and the greatest falsehood is dishonesty.

You will reciprocally promise love, loyalty and matrimonial honesty. We only want for you this day that these words constitute the principle of your entire life and that with the help of divine grace you will observe these solemn vows that today, before God, you formulate.

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.

Honesty will never break you.

A sarcastic person has a superiority complex that can be cured only by the honesty of humility.

I think the number one thing that I find important is the importance of honesty with your friends and your parents, if you can be. But I think that telling people how you really feel, being who you truly are, being safe and taking care of yourself is the most important thing.

A friend to honesty and a foe to crime.

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.

Honesty is the best policy.

I am a very conscientious golfer. I count every stroke. I learned to play that way. That is the only way I can play. It taught me to be honest. There is no greater virtue than honesty.

He that loseth his honesty hath nothing else to lose.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.