It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

I can hear what I want [people] to play. If you don't hear what you want someone to play, then you can't tell 'em.

I don't care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.

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.

I did Bronislaw Kaper's tune. He wrote "On Green Dolphin Street." I mean, I did all those ballads, all them ballads from South America. All those tunes - the guitar concerto on Sketches Of Spain. All those are Spanish melodies. Some of them we made up ourselves.

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

There are no wrong notes.