In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

My devils and angels, fears and hopes, insights and stupidities, loves and loathings, are what they are. I don't edit them out so much as try to make them interesting - whether I am talking to you, or writing a poem, or joking with my kids, or speaking on television.

To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.

There is much appeal for me in Eastern religion, the little I know of it. And something thorny in me finds American adaptations of Buddhism terribly self-indulgent, silly, gooey in the way the English call "wet."