I rarely do autograph shows. Maybe two or three a year. Just to keep my price up. Also I've got too much other stuff to do. I have to teach Renaissance art.

I rarely do autograph shows. Maybe two or three a year. Just to keep my price up. Also I've got too much other stuff to do. I have to teach Renaissance art.

Here we are signing autographs for people who essentially know know how to write their name and are functionally literate. But if you cease to teach cursive writing, how does one know how to, I don’t know, replicate the Declaration of Independence? Or the orations of Cicero? Is it just going to be on the internet?

I'm finishing my Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance history.

I'm just gonna be real grateful to be on any freaking movie set for the rest of my life.

Miles Davis, my one and only real hero of my life. I met him [because] every time I had a movie interview, I would shift the conversation to jazz. Miles, when I finally met him, he knew he had a sucker walking in the door. Because his people told him, “This guy plays the trumpet and every freakin’ interview he has ever given, he’s talked about you.”

My career was always full of risks one way or another, and that's the way I like it.