Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.

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

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.

Be a number one yourself. And not a number two somebody else.

On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.

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.

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.