As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business; I am in the surrender business.

Fidgeting and boredom are the symptoms of fear of emptiness, which we try to fill up with whatever we can lay our hands on.

The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it.

Mastery means responsibility, ability to respond in real time to the need of the moment. Intuitive or inspired living means not just passively hearing the voice, but acting on it.

I no longer sought skill, flexibility, strength, endurance, muscle tone, and quick responsiveness as means of imposing my will on the instrument, but rather of keeping an open and unrestricted pathway for the creative impulse to play its music straight from the preconscious depths beneath and beyond me.

Here the artist is, as it were, an archaeologist, uncovering deeper and deeper strata as he works, recovering not an ancient civilization, but something as yet unborn, unseen, unheard, except by the inner eye, the inner ear. He is not just removing apparent surfaces from some external object, he is removing apparent surface from the Self, revealing his original nature.

When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design. This kind of freedom is the opposite of "just anything".