John Coltrane

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

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

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

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

You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.

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

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.

I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is ’cause I’m changing all the time.

Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents. There must be respect for the people that have gone before.

If my own work had more importance than any others, it’s because the piano is the key instrument in music.

Jazz isn’t a what, it’s a how.

I was a nerd academically. But I was also an athlete and a musician. I never wanted to be shut out of any situation. I think it was that more than anything.

I’m always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.

I feel I have only scratched the surface of what I know I am capable of doing.

Applause felt like approval and it became a drug that soothed the pain, but only temporarily.

When you hear my lyrics, you hear the shots that I throw at people. I throw shots because I always been the underdog. I got rejected so many times, and I say it in my lyrics constantly.

People involve themselves with the superficiality of Jazz without digging for its soul.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.

I thank you in advance for the great round of applause I’m about to get.

The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.