My ego is controlled enough that I don't have to be the focus.

For me Brazilian music is the perfect mix of melody and rhythm. It just bubbles rhythmically. If I had to pick just one music style to play if would be Brazilian.

Why do you have to retire at 65? Why can't you start at 70? You know, like wine. Why can't music be that way? My new band, we're playing stuff that's never been done before.

You have to be concerned with yourself because if you're not on it all the time, nobody else is going to be.

I always say, if you keep your head in the sand, you don't know where the kick's coming from.

I recently formed a foundation to raise awareness for prostate cancer. I feel it's very necessary that men be more aware about prostate cancer and their health in general.

Music allows the great opportunity to play with people who turned you on and you love.

One of the advantages of not having a record contract is that you can make your own mistakes, you don't need somebody else to organize them for you.

To most jazz critics I was basically Kenny G.

When you get cancer, it's like really time to look at what your life was and is, and I decided that everything I've done so far is not as important as what I'm going to do now.

My ego is controlled enough that I don't have to be the focus.

Think about it: Look at the strides of awareness and treatment and tests that women have had with breast cancer, that the gay community has had with AIDS, because they're active and they talk about it.

By the time I'm 90, I hope to have it together.

I was raised in Brooklyn, and I lived there for 59 years.

But when I first got cancer, after the initial shock and the fear and paranoia and crying and all that goes with cancer - that word means to most people ultimate death - I decided to see what I could do to take that negative and use it in a positive way.

The reality is that what you find out is that your head is the medicine. If your head is not in the right place and you don't think positively, all the medicine technology in the world is not going to work.

Being selfish to me means that you have to look out for yourself and you don't have to sacrifice.

What I try to do is produce an atmosphere where musicians want to invest in what they do and give to the recording. I hire those musicians who I know will play something creative and interesting.

I loved the Brazilian music I played. But this is finally me. For the first time I think it's really me.

Being stubborn has helped, being selfish is not a bad thing.

The music we're playing now is based on my heritage, which is Russian, Romanian and Hungarian.

I had sat in one day in Central Park with Bonnie and Delaney, and Duane was playing with them, so I asked if he wanted to work on an album. You never had to say to him how to play the guitar.

My father's father came from Russia; my mother came from Romania.

You don't have to live the blues to play the blues.

My youngest son, who is now the drummer in my band, lives in Brooklyn. My oldest son is about to move out to California, and my daughters are both out of town.

If you want to play somebody's music, you'd better go into his house.

You dont have to live the blues to play the blues.

Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego's evolution.

It was 100 percent music. There was no ego involved, no attitudes, no black and white, it was pure music.

The ego constantly competes with the spirit for control over your inner voice.

Ego is to the true self what a flashlight is to a spotlight.

It's not about ego. Really. If it was ego, I'd be telling you about my awesome... oh, never mind.

I think any spiritual experience that's worthwhile is not about ego and it will humble you in some way. And also, a Zen monk once said to me, 'If you're not laughing, then you're not getting it.'

I like the moment when I break a man's ego.

It was important to have a similar energy in my performance. To make the character too different would have just been about my ego because it didn't need to be drastically different.

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

I think one of the interesting things about poker is that once you let your ego in, you're done for.

I think anybody would have to be with out common sense to think there weren't aliens. There are billions of planets, and I am convinced Earth is not the only one that's inhabited. It would be quite an ego trip to think that. I think about it all the time.

Where id was, there ego shall be.

I have no ego investment in being on the air. I don't knock others for whom that kind of attention is like oxygen, but I don't miss anything about it.

It's very clearly stated in the film: You make your own choices, and what you're always fighting is ego.

If you're working out in front of a mirror and watching your muscles grow, your ego has reached a point where it is now eating itself. That's why I believe there should be a psychiatrist at every health club, so that when they see you doing this, they will take you away for a little chat.

Fabio kept asking me out, but I knew we'd never get his ego through the door.

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

A lot of people have this ego need that makes them want to believe that Earth is the center of the universe and humans are the most important species, the supreme expression of creation.

That's what takes people out of the fight half the time. They get hit and half the reaction is your ego is saying, 'I cannot believe that person just lit me up - how humiliating.'

I never thought about being on a series before. It seemed like such a big commitment. But I love going to work every day. This is not about ego, it's about work, and that's refreshing in this town.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.