I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.

The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.

There are no ordinary lives.

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.

The flame is not out, but it is flickering.

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

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.