John Coltrane

I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy and Bird.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

Jazz affirms the noblest aspirations of character, individual discipline, perseverance and innovation.

I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good – he’s rock’s #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us.

The idea is more important than the style you’re playing in.

If your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough!

The only thing better than singing is more singing.

They’re not particular whether you’re playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.

There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I haven’t yet done.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one’s own.

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.

Listening is more important than anything because that’s what music is. Somebody is playing something and you’re receiving it.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It’s over; it’s on the record.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.