Tony Blair

Conflict is not inevitable, but disarmament is… everyone now accepts that if there is a default by Saddam the international community must act to enforce its will.

You only require two things in life: your sanity and your wife.

In Downing Street they called me ‘Boss’. Civil servants would always call me ‘Prime Minister’.

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.

[on Jeremy Cobyn] It is a different type of Labour Party. Can it be taken back? I don’t know

Once his wife goes to sleep it takes a minor nuclear explosion to wake her.

I cannot say what I think is right about Music. I only know the rightness of it.

You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, ‘Yes, where are you going?’ And he says, ‘I want a ticket to nowhere.’ I thought: that’s it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

A good player can make any instrument sound good.

Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

The more real you get, the more unreal everything else is.

The expression of freedom that is Jazz improvisation mirrors the ethos of the best parts of society.

The problem is that a lot of the blues stations are late on Saturday night, and like a lot of people, I ain’t no vampire!

We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.