You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.

When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.

If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience.

There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one of the nuns discovered this phenomenon and I was actually sent around from classroom to classroom to do the whole thing.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.