Wayne Shorter

I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

Your humanity is your instrument.

Music is interior decoration.

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.

Clouds float in the same pattern only once.

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

Playing the guitar is like telling the truth – you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

A good player can make any instrument sound good.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing very powerful emotions. That’s what draws people towards it.

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn’t know how other people would take it.

One of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport.

I don’t get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.

A musician starting out today should get a great teacher and learn all there is to know about the instrument.

I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother’s aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others.

If it ain’t fun, I want no part of it man. That’s the reason I play.

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

Breathe…. breathe a lot!

Jazz improvisation is the art of drawing without an eraser.