When Lester plays, he almost seems to be singing; one can almost hear the words.

In this country kings or dukes don't amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was the President; so I started calling Lester the President. It got shortened to Pres.

And when you're poor, you grow up fast.

I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been.

People don't understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.

I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel.

God bless the child that's got his own.