I joined Count Basie's band to make a little money and to see the world. For two years I didn't see anything but the inside of a Blue Goose bus, and I never got to send home a quarter.

If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

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

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

You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave.

All dope can do for you is kill you... the long hard way. And it can kill the people you love right along with you.