You always come back to Duke Ellington - he's kind of like the thread that holds everything together from the big band descending to lots of jazz, actually.

I read somewhere that if you translated all the gadgets and technology in our houses to make our lives easier and save time, each of us would have the equivalent of 300 slaves, in Roman times. We have these incredible luxuries, incredible power and privileges, but we seem to be squandering them on little plastic spoons to stir our coffee with, that'll last two seconds in our lives.

The more you look into pigs the more you realize quite how everywhere they are. People come in contact with parts of pigs probably between 20 and 50 times a day. And that's before you even eat your dinner. And yet we just have a long string of negative words about them.

Civilization rests on a set of promises; if the promises are broken too often, the civilization dies, no matter how rich it may be, or how mechanically clever. Hope and faith depend on the promises; if hope and faith go, everything goes.

I dont like Jews. Or colored folk. Or natives, now that you mention it...I bet you like Catholics. Cant stand them either. Nor women, Fabians, Socialists, homosexuals, Asians, or British.

I think rhythm is, when you talk about rhythmic sensibility, quite perceptive in that I like to have at least one thing that is at least common or familiar to the audience.

I think this market space, this modern world we're living in, one of its greatest failures is that it can only seem to describe a collective in terms of consumers or clients. It never sees an audience or a community as part of the process. And that's something I'm quite proud of, even if the music is crap.