John Coltrane

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

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

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

Through Dizzy and Bird I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.

There is no such thing as a wrong note.

You want the listener to find the song on their own, give too much away and it takes away from the imagination.

Music is a gift and a burden I’ve had since I can remember who I was.

Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.

No, working is what will keep you alive.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

Music is an addiction.

Jazz is all about improvisation and it’s about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you’ll never do it this way twice. I’ve studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.

I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

If a guy’s got it, let him give it. I’m selling music, not prejudice.

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, ‘That’s just that ole blues singer.’

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

What we hear is the quality of our listening.