I don’t believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.

Hurry, get on board, it's comin', listen to those rails a-thrumming all aboard. Get on the "A" train, soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem.

There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is to pay them money!

The problem of expressing the contributions that Benny Carter has made to popular music is so tremendous it completely fazes me, so extraordinary a musician is he.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.

The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now.

I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King's son.