The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.

Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.

Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?

With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.

Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing.

Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I'm struggling all the way through to think, "What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I'm hearing that I like so much?" And it's nearly always a sort of mixed emotion, which is why I like it. It's something that I have mixed feelings about in the sense that it's both, say, placid and dangerous, or bitter and sweet, or dark and bright.

Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity.