Ira Gershwin

Love is sweeping the country.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

I’m still searching even today for a sound, like the guy that’s searching for a home. I haven’t been able to find that completely. I’m satisfied at times with the sound of my guitar… but it is a little sound that I hear but I can’t tell anybody about it. I don’t know how. But if I ever get it, I’ll know.

There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I haven’t yet done.

Man, as long as people want to hear Jazz, I’ll give it to them.

Practicing is like getting your vocabulary together to use on the gig.

As a young cellist I had played to an audience that had included Pablo Casals and reacted with poor, nervous playing. Casals sought me out after the concert and praised me highly, somewhat easing the pain and thinking him a very kind man.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.

Jazz music has become academic. Sometimes that doesn’t feel right to me.

The majority of people mistakenly feel they don’t need a live musical experience.

You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room – proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.

I don’t think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.

I’m not thinking about what needs to be on the radio. I’m not thinking about anything other than – I’m just going to let this music come out of me and not have any sort of preconceived notion of what I should do. I’m just going to do it.

I don’t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don’t know.

I could write six songs in one day with everything that’s going on.

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.