Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.

I looked at what adults were doing and how they wanted to earn money, and I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to go away.

Drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble.

I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar

When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.

I just saw a recent television program about art, and it was saying how from the end of the Second World War, so much of what our culture is comes from not just the United States in general, but New York in particular. In my case, I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.