David Geffen

My dream was to make $1,000 a week, have a Cadillac convertible and an apartment on Ocean Park where I would’ve thought that would be nirvana.

There has always been a tremendous obsession with television and movie stars, and with the people involved with the business.

We were all young and we were all inventing our careers. I was very close to Jackson, just as I’d been very close to Laura Nyro. With each person I had a unique relationship.

[on Bill and Hillary Clinton] Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.

We’re not motivated to make more money. We all have too much already. We want to do good work.

I was sleeping on a couch in my brothers apartment, and one day this guy walked over and said ‘How would you like to be in a movie?’ And I said ‘Yeah!’ I was an extra in ‘Explosive Generation’.

I write about moments, and I don’t make blanket statements about anything because no one has all the answers; nobody’s come up with a foolproof way to do anything when it comes to emotions.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.

Keep on listening and tapping your feet.

The secret is keeping busy, and loving what you do.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired and that’s all there is to it.

Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.

Jazz never ends… it just continues.