Sonny Rollins

One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music. That was his reason for being alive. Nothing else mattered except music, really.

I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress…so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.

I’m fortunate that I’m making a living at it now because I’m not equipped to do anything else.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.

I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.

Jazz is so incestuous that it’s starting to kill itself.

Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.

The expression of freedom that is Jazz improvisation mirrors the ethos of the best parts of society.

When the label came to me to say, ‘would you like to do another record,’ I said, ‘Well I got these sixteen songs sitting here, so let’s do it.’ And that was pretty much it… I never stopped writing, it’s just the way that the business is now; you just try to find a different model.

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

We don’t talk music. We just play.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.

You can’t explain Jazz to anyone without losing the experience because it’s feeling, not words.

And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.

There’s so many ways you can hit one note.

Those who were seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music.