Bob Dylan

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.

Wagon Train was on. It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country. I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door – a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

I’m speaking for all of us. I’m the spokesman for a generation.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

Have you ever wondered why young people take to music like fish to water? Maybe it’s because music is fun, plain and simple.

I really feel like I made it a great record. I really feel good about it. In this day and age to make a record that you say, ‘This is different,’ that’s a tough nut. I did it by accident but it got done. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know how to do it.

The popular song is America’s greatest ambassador.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

Music washes away the dust of every day life.

You have to sound sad first, then maybe later you can sound good.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

First of all, 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 isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

Every time I see a musician – it doesn’t matter what age – that inspires me, there’s always a secret little wish that maybe we’ll play together, because that’s how I learn and grow and so forth, you know. But hopefully there’s a lot more.

Jazz is a work in progress. We’ll be defining traditions in Jazz for 200-300 years.

I’ve always depended upon my own melodic instinct, instead of scale like formulas.