Wayne Shorter

You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, ‘Yes, where are you going?’ And he says, ‘I want a ticket to nowhere.’ I thought: that’s it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.

Music is interior decoration.

The word “jazz” means to me no category, but when you get stuck into wanting to do something the way it was with the “jazz emblem” or logo chained around your neck, you play in a frozen moment in time and you keep fermenting the ‘fifties saying jazz should be this way or that. Well, if jazz to me means no category, then I’ve got the green light And if it sounds like.. sounds like.. sounds like, and keeps crossing over, it’s what I wanted to do in the first place. I like the way Stravinsky and those guys did things. They expressed something, if not themselves. In fact, some people talk about expression, but expression really doesn’t mean anything to me because there’s a lot of work which goes into building a drama and then it’s up to other people to offer “expression.” Expression is such a nebulous thing.

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

Clouds float in the same pattern only once.

I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

I don’t care much about music. What I like is sounds.

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

There’s always room for improvisation or changes of expression.

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of original thought is the most fraudulent and destructive element in Jazz education.

I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.

Only play what you hear. If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

Keep on listening and tapping your feet.

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

There are notes between notes, you know.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

I feel I have only scratched the surface of what I know I am capable of doing.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

I wasn’t so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That’s why I’m broke.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it’s a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don’t listen.