Your optimism today will determine your level of success tomorrow.

Sometimes I say to my students, "We get to come and listen to our favorite recordings and try to learn from them and emulate that and hopefully we can inspire other people the way we've been inspired."

If I could have picked two guys on the planet, to have some exposure to at that age, those were the two right guys [Phil Woods and Charles McPherson].

Everybody wants the quick fix, but it doesn't happen overnight. You have to be willing to put it out there. I call it 'the secret to being an overnight success,' which means there really isn't a such thing as an overnight success. ! The secret is you work really hard for 10 years, and then you become an overnight success.

Positivity is like a boomerang. The more we put it out there, the more it comes back to us.

I think we're in a time and place, the last 20 plus years, and certainly now, it's only more so, where it's just about us creating a body of work. Creating hopefully our own scene.

I remember [Joe] Lovano came around to me at that time [of Monk competition]. And I had taken some lessons with Joe and I had seen Joe on the scene. He had always been so great to me, such and inspiration and so kind. One lesson that I had with Joe was just amazing. I'm just such a fan and an admirer of his on every level. He was like, "Don't worry... you're just out here. You just do what you're doing. Don't worry if it doesn't make you a household name or anything."