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

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.

Consequently, a young business often grows by large percentages. Mature businesses rarely do.

I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.

Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.

Well, one of the most important things for Americans to be reminded of is that a lot of the exceptional nature of our country is founded in Judeo-Christian values that promotes individualism, personal responsibility, a strong work ethic, and a commitment to family, charity.

There's no connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

You're not going to get the butt you want...by sitting on it.

I have about 4 albums of Disney songs, but the embarrassing part is that I know each song word for word, and have dances choreographed for most.

If I say a joke and the audience laughs it makes me feel good.

My belief is that no movie, nothing in life, leaves people neutral. You either leave them up or you leave them down.

Affairs of state tend to drive most presidents toward the center on both foreign and domestic policy, no matter where on the political spectrum they begin, and especially so in the areas of intelligence and law enforcement.

I hate people who splash their own pain on covers, like the whole world should hear about them. Why are we all supposed to be interested in one individual's suffering?

Belize pledges it continued support to the aspirations of the 23 million people of Taiwan to be full participants in all organs and agencies of the international community.

At parties, I'll start talking and notice everyone is looking at me and feel dumb and say, 'Forget it,' and then start eating things.

St. Andrews is the Home of Golf and the greatest course in the world. Any time you can win at St. Andrews would be special. It's every golfer's dream to win out here.

Man is never perfect nor contented.

I'm like a decathlete without the body.

When you're providing emergency aid, you're fighting hunger; you're filling stomachs.

There's one good thing about snow, it makes your lawn look as nice as your neighbor's.

I like this life. I like it when it's hard, and I like it better when it's not, but I know you don't get the sweet part without the bitter.

People who play conventional music are threatened by electronica and don't consider it to be as valuable as what they do.

It's scoring goals that's great, whether against Brazil or anybody else.

Some go on to trade schools or get further training for jobs they are interested in. Some go into the arts, some are craftsmen, some take a little time out to travel, and some start their own businesses. But our graduates find and work at what they want to do.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.

When I'm actually getting off the bus, I still have my gospel playing. That's the way-to-the-game kind of music.