At this point, I don't listen to other people too much. I'm not really that affected by anyone.

I finally decided if I was going to make a living, I was gonna have to come to New York.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

I sang and wrote songs when I was 12 years old.

Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.

I just have a lot off different influences.

I'm playin' the music I like.

I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.

Pizza Express has been a real godsend for me. I've been working there for several years, six weeks a year. You can go to work every night and play. It's a nice little club. It's just about the right size for me, about 150 people.

I can't judge my own stuff. That's for others. But those are the three things that I admire.

I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.

I've heard some tunes in recent years that were pretty close to that same idea. The idea was you turn on the radio and you want to hear some music and up comes a commercial.

I haven't stopped and I don't plan on stoppin' any time soon.

I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people's tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known.

Traveling these days has a lot of problems and also it wears you out more.

I've been able to do pretty well. I don't work as many consecutive nights as I used to, but I'm still working over 100 nights a year, so that's good for me.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

There's a few tunes of mine that don't have jokes, but most of them have a joke and they have a humorous point of view somewhere.

I'm playin' music for a certain type of person. Fortunately, there are more and more of us. At least there are more comin' to see me than there were 30 years ago or so.

I went through the whole number, you know. The swing era, the boogie woogie era, the bebop era. Thelonious Monk is still one of my favorites. So a lot of these people had their effect on me.

I have no idea what I'm doin'. I've never seen me.

But I got an audience that knows what I do. They usually show up, so I usually do pretty good.

The thing of playin' and singin' never bothered me.

I just try to do as good job with the material as I can and play some jazz as well, some improvised music, and do that every night. Just see where it goes.

The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.

At this point, I don't listen to other people too much. I'm not really that affected by anyone.

It's as much fun as it ever was, you know, once I get there. Gettin' there is a little harder.

My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

And Lennie Tristano I like a lot, I still like him.

So I'm in my 51st year of playin' mostly nightclubs. I do some concerts.

I been getting good crowds. It only took 50 years.

There's a lot of terrible things goin' on all the time, but you gotta try and have some fun in the end.

I do some concerts. At the moment, I'm being helped a lot by a gig I play in London, which is Pizza Express.

The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing & instrumental personality.

There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.

Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.

Many are needed to plant and water what has been planted now that the faith has spread so far and there are so many people... No matter who plants or waters, God gives no harvest unless what is planted is the faith of Peter and unless he agrees to his teachings.

DJs and people in the street know what they like.

People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.

Some people are directors and I think they should stay behind the camera.

We dominated Survivor - there is no way we would not dominate that, too. I can see it already, us making deals with people. That's the best part, and with the Race, it would be even more fun because I've got a lot of tricks up my sleeve.

I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.

We must support initiatives that provide clear, concrete measures and milestones that our troops need for defeating the insurgency, building up Iraqi security forces, and handing over Iraq to the Iraqi people.

Yeah, that's what kind of, we get the idea a little bit yeah, because other people from different countries also try as hard as they can to get a medal or a gold medal in the Olympic Games. And you know, if they can work hard, we can work hard as well.

Well concerning the world records that I did, I think it helps a lot to me, yeah. I think it's a very individual thing because I heard some people say, like, oh I don't like it at all. But I definitely, for me it really made a big difference.

My goal is, of course, for this show to do well, and I would love it if people liked it.

I hate wasting people's time.

Religions get lost as people do.

I also do not like the idea of soft money, these issue ads - people don't know where the money is coming from, millions and millions of dollars outside of the control of a candidate - there's no accountability.