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

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.

The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.

We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.