To create, we need both technique and freedom of technique

Artwork is not thought up in consciousness and then, as a separate phase, executed by the hand. The hand surprises us creates and solves problems on its own. Often, enigmas that baffle our brains are dealt with easily, unconsciously, by the hand.

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

Play cannot be defined, because in play all definitions slither, dance, combine, break apart, and recombine.

There is not ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.

Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away. A frog lays several million eggs at a sitting. Only a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those become frogs. We can let imagination and practice be as profligate as nature.

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