To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?

Music isn't enough. Performers aren't enough. There must be someone that loves music as much as life. For you, and remember this always, those of us with something urgent to say, we give everything.

You need to love this with your heart and soul. You need to breathe music. My best advice — perform as much as you can. With every mistake, progress.

If getting used to music is the essential condition for understanding, it is hard to see just what purpose is served by writing about it. A few experiences of listening to a symphony or nocturne are worth more than any essay or analysis. The work of art itself teaches us how to understand it, and makes the critic not merely parasitical but strictly superfluous.

Music is like a language: you cannot understand it unless you learn it, or more accurately, are born into it.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

Watching him, I understood for the first time how you could really live music, how you could listen to it completely and make it come alive, so that it was part of your life.

"So, if music is the best, what is music? Anything can be music, but it doesn't become music until someone wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music.

Most people can't deal with that abstraction — or don't want to. They say: "Gimme the tune. Do I like this tune? Does it sound like another tune that I like? The more familiar it is, the better I like it. Hear those three notes there? Those are the three notes I can sing along with. I like those notes very, very much. Give me a beat. Not a fancy one. Give me a GOOD BEAT — something I can dance to. It has to go boom-bap, boom-boom-BAP. If it doesn't, I will hate it very, very much. Also, I want it right away — and then, write me some more songs like that — over and over and over again, because I'm really into music.

Anybody who wants to be a real musician must be able to set a menu to music.

It's impossible for me to say one word about all that music has meant to me in my life. How, then, can I hope to be understood?

My ambition was to live like music.

to understand a people, you need to wade into their culture. It’s culture that tells their tale. And music is culture.

I see my life in terms of music.

I have suffered for my music. Now it's your turn.