"Music isn't selling like it used to, but the one thing you can't steal or download is a live show experience or a T-shirt."

"I've dreamed of being on the road, traveling and touring, for as long as I've been into doing music. It's what I live for. I just wanna be Willie Nelson."

"I think, back in the day, when I was first starting to make music, all I wanted to do was to get a record deal."

"London, from the architecture to the culture to the fashion to the accents, feels like it's a special place."

"My mom would always play me a lot of late-'50s, late-'60s rock."

"I grew up in Oakland and Berkeley, California."

"'Runaround Sue' was a big record for me, as well as the music video for it."

"I don't know if most people know it or not, but I produce, like, 95% of my own stuff."

"In my opinion, creative control means a lot, I feel like I'm really in touch with who my fans are and what they like about my music, and I'm able to communicate directly with them."

"I see myself as a hip-hop artist, but I never wanted to make music for a specifically white audience. Thats not what I grew up around."

"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story."

"Heart, have no pity on this house of bone: Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy."

"When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have."

"The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines."

"There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind ... the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed."

"I began by tinkering around with some old tunes I knew. Then, just to try something different, I set to putting some music to the rhythm that I used in jerking ice-cream sodas at the Poodle Dog. I fooled around with the tune more and more until at last, lo and behold, I had completed my first piece of finished music."

"Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat. I think that people who don't dance, or who never did dance, don't really understand the beat... I know musicians who don't and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating."

"If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original. ... I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. ... I don't need time, I need a deadline. ...There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind. ... Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one."

"It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line"

"Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom... In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country."

"You can’t write music right unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker."

"There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind."

"Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion."

"The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen."