Edison failed ten thousand times before he perfected the modern electric lamp. The average man would have quit at the first failure. That's why there are so many average men and only one Edison.

Music has always had the ability to comfort and inspire.

If there's a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things? They break up two of them, and three more like them spring up!

After visits to several Communist countries (USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, East Germany, Vietnam, China, Cuba), I feel strongly that most "revolutionary" types around the world don't realize the importance of freedom of the press and the air, a right to peaceably assemble and discuss anything, including the dangers of such discussions.

We will never know everything. But I think if we can learn within the next few decades to face the danger we all are in, I believe there will be tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of human beings working wherever they are to do something good.

Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience.

But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail.