Justin Di Cioccio led a jazz program at Music and Art, but there was no jazz in Performing Arts. After they joined, it became Laguardia School of Arts.

Failure is not meant to be final and fatal.... It is meant to refine you to be all that you are meant to be.

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

If you are complaining you can't be thinking about or creating what you do want.

Thoughts are magnetic. What we think about we attract.

I was [ on Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition] with Ralph Bowen, and Joel Frahm, Jimmy Greene, John Ellis. You can't play the saxophone better than any of those guys play. So many of those things that those guys could do I wish I could do now, let alone then.

If you go with that spirit, good things will come for you. If you go into it with an assumption that you're a genius and that you're entitled to something, it's a little tougher.