The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm

Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.

It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.