Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

I always thought that no matter what kind of work people did, they should involve themselves totally with all the discrimination they ran into.

In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am.

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.

Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace.