I Practiced Saxophone Eight Hours A Day

People Think That I Play Effortlessly. I Remember Doing A Record Date With Bill Evans And Afterwards He Said To Me, You Make It Sound So Easy But When I Get Right Up Next To You You're Working Hard And Making It Sound Easy!

I Never Consciously Tried To Conceive Of What My Sound Should Be.

I've Done Some Dastardly Things But What Can I Do Except Make Amends And Apologize?

My Life Is Music, And In Some Vague, Mysterious And Subconscious Way, I Have Always Been Driven By A Taut Inner Spring Which Has Propelled Me To Almost Compulsively Reach For Perfection In Music, Often - In Fact, Mostly - At The Expense Of Everything Else In My Life.

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.