I don't ever want to grow up. That's boring.

I'm Pisces with Leo rising. The Pisces part is the dreamer. The Leo says, 'Let's execute.'

I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.

I believe in astrology as much as I do in genetics.

Cherish your mistakes, and you won't keep making them over and over again. It's the same with heartbreaks and girls and everything else. Cherish them, and they'll put some wealth in you.

It's amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don't have anything else to do.

Everybody has their idiosyncrasies.

You make your mistakes to learn how to get to the good stuff.

I was reading Omar Khayyam, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, L. Ron Hubbard, all sorts of philosophy. Bebop cats are like that. Curious. I wanted to know about everything.

I have all the tools and gadgets. I tell my son, who's a producer, 'You never work for the machine; the machine works for you.'

I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.

I went with Lionel Hampton for three years. Out of that came a trip to Europe.

If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.

It slaps your dignity just right. I loved the idea of these proud, dignified black men, and I saw the older ones wounded, and it wounded me ten times as much because I couldn't stand seeing them hurt like this.

It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.

We stole a box of honey jars one time and went out in the woods and took care of the whole box. I don't think I touched honey again for 20 years. I never wanted to see honey again.

When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.

When I was 14, I was a passenger in a terrible accident.

Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.

The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.

I'm just a musician and a record producer.

I'm not a psychiatrist.

I've met every freak in the business.