Write: write letters. Keep journals. Besides your children, there is no surer way of achieving immortality.

Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

Do not lose your enthusiasm. In its Greek etymology, the word enthusiasm means, "God in us."

There are no ordinary lives.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's an active disengagement.