Bob Dylan

I’ve been up the mountain and I had a choice. Should I come down? So I came down. God said, Okay, you’ve been up on the mountain, now you go down. You’re on your own, free. Check in later, but now you’re on your own.

Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

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.

Sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean.

A lot of people can’t stand touring but to me it’s like breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I do Jazz, Blues, Country and so forth. I do them all like a good utility man.

I don’t care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.

You can have tone and technique but without originality you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original.

I think I’ve tried to stay true to my music since the beginning. It’s kind of hard because of the access and technology but I just do what I do.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.

Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio.

It’s about getting the sound to flow from your body and allowing that sound to get to the piano.

If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there’s something wrong with my act.

Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn’t know how to read music is over.

When I heard T-Bone, I flat out lost my mind.

Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible.