David Geffen

In the end, you’re just a renter anyway. You only own these things for as long as you live. After that, who knows? If I live until I’m 80, I’ll have 30 more years of collecting. If the collection is big enough, I’ll build a museum. And if not, I’ll leave it to a museum.

This Velvet Mafia thing is just another homophobic, nasty kind of thing that jealous queens make up.

I must have had a dozen jobs and I got fired from all of them.

The epiphany for me at William Morris was realizing, ‘They bullshit on the phone! I can bullshit on the phone too!’

[On his donation of $100 million to UCLA in 2012 adding to the $200 million he donated in 2002] The cost of a world-class medical education should not deter our future innovators, doctors and scientists from the path they hope to pursue. We need the students at this world-class institution to be driven by determination and the desire to do their best work and not by the fear of crushing debt. I hope in doing this that others will be inspired to do the same.

In my experience, there was never anything quite like the egos in CSNY.

I’m creating music – it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it.

I’m trying to make music a sensual expression, not and academic experiment.

I met up with George Shearing about a year before my mother passed away. When I was 11 years old, Mama took me to the Edgewater Inn in Seattle and I was able to sit down and play piano for George and a lot of (the set list) was songs I had heard from the album, ‘Concerto For My Love.’ Then, after Mama died, my dad and I went to actually hear him perform at the Edgewater Inn when I was 12. Oh my gosh! It just really got me into playing piano.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night, but differently each time.

I don’t think anybody steals anything; all of us borrow.

I like the interplay in the music.

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.

Music can’t save the world, but can make one a little calmer.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

You give up your own personality when you imitate somebody.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper… a windshield wiper that’s fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and you’ve got dance music.

Jazz music just resonates with the frequency of me.

The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.