A man goes to the village to visit the wise man and he says to the wise man, “I feel like there are two dogs inside me. One dog is this positive, loving, kind, and gentle dog and then I have this angry, mean-spirited, and negative dog and they fight all the time. I don't know which is going to win.” The wise man thinks for a moment and he says, “I know which is going to win. The one you feed the most, so feed the positive dog.

A guy like Scott [Robinson] plays the whole history of music on every instrument you've ever heard of. He's just kind of an unparalleled genius.

The first CD I had, that I think had had any redeeming qualities to it, I did when I was 25 with a relatively small label called Chiarascuro.

There's a story about when President Lyndon Johnson visited NASA and as he was walking the halls he came across a janitor who was cleaning up a storm, like the Energizer bunny with a mop in his hand. The president walked over to the janitor and told him he was the best janitor he has ever seen and the janitor replied, "Sir, I'm not just a janitor, I helped put a man on the moon." See, even though he was cleaning floors he had a bigger purpose and vision for his life. This is what kept him going and helped him excel in his job.

Successful people do ordinary things with extraordinary consistency, commitment and focus.

I'm reaching a certain level [at school] that I had been aspiring to with all these incredibly advanced classical peers around me that I had been trying to be able to hang with them a little bit.

[Winning the Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition]definitely opened some doors.