Gerry Mulligan

You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

If you’ve only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

Eliminating the piano means that I’ve always worked closer with the bass than most players.

When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.

Yet if today has no meaning, the past was a Blank and the future is a Chaos.

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

There is always, always, always something to be thankful for.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Much depends on people knowing what opportunity means; it doesn’t mean a silver platter, it oftener means a spade. Self-help means something sterner than ‘help yourself’–reach over and take it.

He who seeks revenge should remember to dig two graves

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.

The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

Life experiences, mental illness, drugs, greed, environment, and poor role-modeling can all forge damaged people and can generate a darkness, an exploitiveness, in the way they approach life. Whatever their genesis, there are people in your life (and mine) who will hurt you if you let them.

I beg you take courage; the brave soul can mend even disaster.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

The achievement of one goal should be the starting point of another.

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.