Let my children have music! Let them hear live music.

Most customers, by the time the musicians reach the second set, are to some extent inebriated. They don't care what you play anyway.

I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient.

Since the white man says he came from the evolution of animals, well, maybe the black man didn't. The white man has made so many errors in the handling of people that maybe he did come from a gorilla or a fish and crawl up on the sand and then into the trees. Of course, evolution doesn't take God into consideration. I don't think people learned to do all the things they do through evolution.

Most of the soloists at Birdland had to wait for Parker's next record in order to find out what to play next. What will they do now?

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

That sound in tune to you?.. Sounds sharp to me. Sounds like I'm playing sharp all the time. My singing teacher told us you should do that. Maybe I got it from her. She said singers when they grow old have a tendency to go flat. So if you sing sharp as a young person, as you get older and go flat, you'll be in tune. In other words, it's never thought good to be flat. It means you can't get to the tone.