John Coltrane

Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.

You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.

I’m always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I’ve been.

That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.

Jazz stands for freedom.

I love it. When they stop imitating me then I’ll start wondering where I’m going wrong. Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

Jazz isn’t a what, it’s a how.

I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel.

If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!

And if I had a preference, it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.

You’re just a little too hip for the room. It’s not good to be too hip because two hips make an ass.

I’m just trying to create context for me to improve my musicianship.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

Mary Lou Williams used to tell me: If you’re not feeling right, play a minor tune and it falls into place.

Jazz is a living music; since its beginning has expressed the feelings, dreams and hopes of the people.

All this is saying is, OK I see now, the ‘hood does not quite want Shirley Bassey yet, so let me still give them this. Crack Music was made after Diamonds. After black people were like, ‘I don’t know about this one.’ It was like me reaching too high for the cookie jar.

Jazz has always been a man telling the truth about himself.