We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.

It's a different ballgame now, so that lets [teo] Macero out. He's always complainin', always sick.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That's a little bit too much.

You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played

I couldn't do "What's Love Got To Do With It", Tina Turner because it wasn't the right tempo; so I scratched it from the record. I wanted to do it about a year ago, but something happened.

When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.