John Coltrane

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

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

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

The emotional reaction is all that matters.

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

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

If I’m not saying it in four choruses or less, then I’m not saying it.

I came from an era when we didn’t use electronic instruments. The bass wasn’t even amplified. The sound was the sound you got.

Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression.

I don’t compose. I assemble materials.

When I heard T-Bone, I flat out lost my mind.

To keep a band together you simply need a gimmick. The gimmick I use is to pay them money.

I may be helping to bring harmony between people through my music.

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often -in fact, mostly -at the expense of everything else in my life.

After the music is over it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

I think you have to leave a lot to the imagination!

I’ll be writing songs till I die. There’s just no question.