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

If I "try" to play, I fail; if I force the play, I crush it; if I race, I trip. Any time I stiffen or brace myself against some error or problem, the very act of bracing would cause the problem to occur. The only road to strength is vulnerability.

An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution

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.

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.

Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.

If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.