Young people should travel, and they don’t. You can’t know if you don’t go.

Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.

I never felt like I had a mother.

You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.

A lot of the guys were like that - Oscar Pettiford - they just took me under their wing, and that's why I automatically help young people. I just love it, because they did that for me.

China's got a billion people and a hit record over there is a million records. You know that ain't right.

Billy Strayhorn wrote Multicolored Blue. Billy to me is the boss of the arrangers.