If you listen to a lot of music, it gradually seeps into your consciousness or your unconsciousness and comes out in your music.

If you listen to a lot of music, it gradually seeps into your consciousness or your unconsciousness and comes out in your music.

You're just sort of searching for this "thing" and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

Classical musicians do this all the time. They want perfection. So they piece things together. Eight bars of this and six bars of that. Glenn Gould said that with a recording he wanted to make perfect versions of pieces.

Every time I listen back to solos of mine I'll hear something I like and then another phrase that I can't stand. You have to live with what you play. And the recording medium puts that on us. When I play live gigs I don't think so much like that.

I don't remember what was going through my mind, but what was going through my body was fear and terror. I had been on the road with Johnny and working gigs and playing a lot of the organ clubs.

On record dates like that I never felt too nervous because everything was really overdubbed. When we did that album, we were in the studio for probably a week, so you had a lot of opportunity to fix things.

I don't think anybody really super-consciously tries to develop a style to play.

I grew up listening to Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, guys with blues backgrounds.

I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.

I think once I started writing my own music and having my own bands, that's when I got more of a focus on what I wanted to do, personally.

In the studio, if things go wrong, you stop things and fix them. I have never been in a recording studio, really, where the people in the booth were not interested in making a very good album. It's often a light-hearted atmosphere but serious at the same time.

Take '39 Steps'. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.

The music is fun. The big difference performing it live is that we might get a little more heated, not as subdued, we'll stretch things out more. It's how you stay fresh after such a long time in the business.

The way I evolved was playing straight-ahead jazz into playing more fusion-type stuff just because I was young enough to get into it. As I get older, I find myself coming back to where I kind of started.

When we improvise freely - that is, without a structure - it tends to sound more like 20th century classical music, more like a classical ensemble improvising, as opposed to a free-jazz group, where you're more used to hearing saxophones honking.

You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

The essential elements of giving are power and love - activity and affection - and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other.

What's fascinating is that when you write a script, it's almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you're not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.

A young man is stirred and stimulated by the consciousness of how much depends upon his own exertions: a young girl is oppressed by it.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Life is a state of consciousness.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.

You shall always find what you created in your mind, for instance, a benevolent God or an evil Devil. Between them are countless facets. Therefore, concentrate on the depth of your consciousness and on what you consider to be positive and good.

Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions - of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

And if I can take part in it by transforming my own consciousness, then someone else's, I'm happy to do it.

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect.

I believe it is essential for our planetary future to develop tools that can change the consciousness which has created the crisis that we are in.

Malcolm X raised my consciousness about myself and my people and other people more than any person I know. I knew him before he became Malcolm X.

If any human being is to reach full maturity both the masculine and feminine sides of the personality must be brought up into consciousness.

You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected.

Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

I think that the consciousness of passion makes you act very differently.

The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.

It just is nothing foreign to consciousness at all that could present itself to consciousness through the mediation of phenomena different from the liking itself; to like is intrinsically to be conscious.

You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness.

Partly because the town is just finicky, there are strange Catch 22 clauses in the consciousness of this community and one of them was that you, I found out, you can't do a comedy unless you've just done a comedy.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.