John Coltrane

All of the technique doesn’t matter… only if the feeling is right.

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

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

The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.

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.

I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind.

It’s not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

The more you listen, the more your hear.

Music is born out of the inner sounds within a soul.

One way or the other, if you want to find reasons why you shouldn’t keep on, you’ll find ’em. The obstacles are all there; there are a million of ’em.

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’.

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

There’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else.

We don’t talk music. We just play.

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

I’m more careful about my hands than about what I eat and most anything else, because my hands have been my living. My hands have been able to help me learn. My hands have taken me around the world. So I’m very proud of my hands.

The Blues contain so much joy and sadness at the same time.