The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.

He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.

I never asked to be born in the first place.

One of the things I'm going to say out there is how grateful I am - and how grateful the world is - for the tremendous gift of the black people, of jazz.

It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.

We could have saved the earth, but we were too damned cheap.

I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was.