To a smart girl men are no problem - they're the answer.
I am viewed as the Negro who has gone outside of the categories assigned to me.
Is jazz a rhythm, or is it a vibration?
Everybody in America is angry about something.
I have learned through time that not everyone is interested in the kinds of things that fascinate me.
For the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity—or even western creativity—but this assumption was seriously in error.
I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I'm a professional student of music.
I wouldn't wear makeup, and I didn't like to let boys open the door for me because I felt like it was sexist.
Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.
In the long run, you make your own luck - good, bad, or indifferent.
All the champions - you go and ask Mike Tyson or Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Lennox Lewis and myself included, and I'm sorry for putting myself in line with all the other great names - but the champion's attitude is it doesn't matter who is in front of me, I am going to conquer this person and win the fight and knock the person out.