You must be willing to accept the fact that pain is a part of the process of revelation.

If you're going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit.

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

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.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.