Les Paul

Every setback might be the very thing that makes you carry on and fight all the harder and become much better.

If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there’s something wrong with my act.

I got the mumps. They threw me in a crib so I wouldn’t roll out onto the floor. And there’s a big bay window in my house, and that window stayed perfectly still until that train started to chug. At a certain speed, I could reach up and feel the pane, and that glass pane would vibrate. I said, Doggone, there’s got to be a reason for this. So I go to the kindergarten teacher, and she takes me to the science teacher, and the science teacher takes me to the library and reads it off to me — “This is called resonance.” That was the beginning.

There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can’t go there. So I’m back to Count Basie lifting his hand. And I find you can stop that show with one note just like you can with a hundred.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.

When you just get mixed up and there’s too much going on, then it’s time to pick up your guitar.

I compulsively reach for perfection in music, often at the expense of everything else in my life.

You have a mentor or teacher and you learn all he can show you.

You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.

I heard someone say ‘What’s that kid doing here? Call your piano player and let’s get started.’

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you

It is Jazz’s very nature to change, to develop and adapt to the circumstances of its environment.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you’d see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

I don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

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.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.