An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

The good old days are neither better nor worse than the ones we're living through right now.

Benny Goodman plays the clarinet. I play music.

An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control.

People ask what those women saw in me. Let's face it, I wasn't a bad-looking stud. But that's not it. It's the music; it's standing up there under the lights. A lot of women just flip; looks have nothing to do with it. You call Mick Jagger good-looking?

I wanted to resign from the planet, not just music. It stopped being fun with success. Money got in the way. Everybody got greedy, including me. Fear set in. I got miserable when I became a commodity.

If I could have done anything more, it would have been less