Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.

The extent of his influence across jazz, across American music, and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.

When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.

Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.

In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.

If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.