Everybody ought to listen to Benny [Carter]. He's a whole musical education.

Food makes my mind sluggish.

I've come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I've never got there. . . . I'm always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play everyday.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It's over; it's on the record.

You have to practice for a long time before you can learn to sound like yourself

It's like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of s-- is that, but white people's s--?

I don't hold it against Dizzy [Gillespie], you know, but if a guy wants to play a certain way, you work towards that. If he stops - he's full of crap, you know. I mean, I wouldn't do it, for no money, or for no place in the white man's world. Not just to make money, because then you don't have anything. You don't have as much money as whoever you're trying to ape; that's making money by being commercial. Then you don't have anything to give the world; so you're not important. You might as well be dead.