I don't remember feeling love.

The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.

I used to practice piano for hours, and now, with a synthesizer, you can input the music and the machine perfects the song. That's why we have so many people in the music business who should be plumbers. They don't really understand music because they haven't been trained.

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

All the jazz guys had interracial relationships, and even the ladies did. Over the years, interracial relationships have been a hip, almost defiant thing, a way of saying "Nobody can put a boundary around me."

When you're over the hill, that's when you pick up speed.

I never felt like I had a mother.