“It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.”

“Intuition has to lead knowledge, but it can’t be out there alone.”

“Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique… a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, Forget that. I’m just going to be expressive…”

“There are a million things you can do, and so you just have to perfect your own art and hopefully there will be room for it.”

“The only thing I’m afraid of is death. When I was eighteen or nineteen I could have died. I was ready for death. Today, I’m not ready anymore. I’ve lost too much time as it is.”

“I never strive for identity. That’s something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually.”

“It’s a good leader thing to do, not to show you the whole thing, just to give you a little nudge in the right direction and then you find it yourself and, you know, gives you some momentum.”

“I wasn’t striving for any originality really, I was just striving to play as good as I could. And frankly, I think anybody that tries to be original is way off anyhow, you know, because it’s got to be some kind of an aberration or an affectation… I remember reading a letter of Mozart’s that says uhh, ‘My originality is no more self-conscious than the nose on my face,’ or something like that.”

“I think some young people want a deeper experience. Some people just wanna be hit over the head and, you know, if then they [get] hit hard enough maybe they’ll feel something. You know? But some people want to get inside of something and discover, maybe, more richness. And I think it will always be the same, they’re not going to be the great percentage of the people. A great percentage of the people don’t want a challenge. They want something to be done to them — they don’t want to participate. But there’ll always be maybe 15% maybe, 15%, that desire something more, and they’ll search it out — and maybe that’s where art is, I think.”