I'm a very, very stubborn man.

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.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

I am neither a child, a young man, nor an ancient; nor am I of any caste.

I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is not in their power to help themselves.

I always looked for a man to rescue me and bring me happiness. I bought into that myth, of course, and looked for my own Prince Charming.

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

A man must be strong in that profession, he must have vigor of body and mind, yet I am all out of breath if I walk up a hill; I have not the heart to crush even a fly.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

I believe that if a man does a job as well as a woman, he should be paid as much.

For a man to strike any women is most brutal, and I, as well as everyone else, think this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which, wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible and more courageous.

There is always a type of man who says he loves his fellow men, and expects to make a living at it.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.

If a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you? If you don't, you're as dumb as he is.

Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things.

Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.

'Thou shalt not get found out' is not one of God's commandments; and no man can be saved by trying to keep it.

Sex is the most beautiful thing that can take place between a happily married man and his secretary.

Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

I think I had a more European outlook about the body and sex. The body is in no way dirty, and sex is something beautiful to give to and share with a lover. It has nothing to do with promiscuity, because I only believe in being in love with one man at a time.

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.