"When I was in my prime, I was an egomaniac and didn’t allow my wife to buy the best sardines–the King Oscars–which bear my name. I felt there should be only one king in my house."

"In the middle and late 50′s I was in hospitals constantly. I was committed every time I drew a breath or took an extra twelve pills–which never affected me much because I’m not suicidal."

"I have seizures of momentary sanity."

"Instant unconsciousness had been my greatest passion for ten years."

"A psychiatrist once diagnosed my troubles as “an abdication of will.”"

"As a rule I never read bad reviews about myself because my best friends invariably tell me about them."

"I rated the drug Demerol over sex as the ultimate pleasure at one time. Now I don’t have access to either."

"When I used to speak of the lunatic fringe, I didn’t know I was going to be head of it."

"The other night my daughter Lorna reminisced about the time I regressed to complete infantilism. We were having dinner and tapioca pudding was served. A wild glint came into my eyes and in the presence of my wife and children I shrieked at the top of my voice, “I love this more than anything in the world!” I had to be withdrawn from tapioca pudding slowly. It was one of the few times I wasn’t committed to achieve withdrawal."

"Now that Marilyn Monroe is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her."

"Once he makes up his mind, he's full of indecision."

"I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients."

"I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself."

"I am no more humble than my talents require."

"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left."

"I envy people who drink — at least they know what to blame everything on."

"It's an advantage having a limited output. When George Gershwin is asked to play his repertoire, he plays all evening. I just play "Lady Play Your Mandolin" and I'm through."

"If George is around, it will."

"He writes the kind of music you whistle on the way into the theater."

"Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember."

"John O'Hara was a terrible bore as a young man—always looking for a fight, and making sure he never found one."

"The difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is that the Democrats let the poor be corrupt, too."

"Ballet is the fairies' baseball."

"Zsa Zsa Gabor not only worships at The Golden Calf, she insists on barbecuing it for lunch."

"I heartily approve of her campaign to beautify America. It would be greatly improved if the First Family were kept out of sight."

"An epigram is only a wisecrack that's played at Carnegie Hall."

"I once said cynically of a politician, "He'll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it.""

"My last picture for Warners was Romance on the High Seas. It was Doris Day's first picture; that was before she became a virgin."

"Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you will find the real tinsel underneath."

"There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."

"I'm a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy."

"I don't drink liquor. I don't like it. It makes me feel good."

"The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue."

"It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character."

"This piano plays. Which is more than I can say for her."

"Incompatibility. And besides, I think she hated me."

"He never asks the orchestra to do anything which contradicts the players' feeling of what the music signifies or what the printed notes of the score actually mean in plain musical language. To his credit he does not pretend to omniscience. When a certain progression of programs with the Philharmonic decreed that he conduct the Brahms Fourth Symphony two seasons ago, he disavowed intensive rehearsals with the simple statement to the orchestra: "Gentlemen, you know the work better than I do." Both the compliment and the attitude endeared themselves so much to the orchestra that they literally forgot themselves in a mass effort to justify his statement—and, as one of those who heard the performance, I can testify that they delivered one of the most powerful and integrated interpretations of the score that New York has experienced in years."

"I would like to have been present, if I could have my choice of all moments in music history, when Stokowski suddenly became conscious of his beautiful hands. That must have been a moment. Like stout Cortez [sic] on a peak in Darien (I know it was Balboa) he saw before him a limitless expanse, a whole uncharted sea that might be subjected to his influence, free from the encumbrance of a baton."

"A symphonic conductor should reconcile himself to the realization that, regardless of his approach or temperament, the eventual result is the same — the orchestra will hate him."

"It would have been better if you had died and Gershwin had written the elegy."

"Tell me, George, if you had it to do all over, would you fall in love with yourself again?"

"It certainly will be if you are still around."

"I’ll play it and tell you what it is later."

"Most jazz musicians are happy just to achieve some popularity, but Miles Davis was a genuine icon. Famously fashionable even in his early days – a Davis biography was subtitled ‘The Man in the Green Shirt’ after a particularly stylish album cover – his adoption of jazz-rock in the 1970s and ’80s made him a superstar, bewitching audiences with not just his spare, declamatory trumpet-playing, but also his brooding persona. Dubbed the ‘Prince of Darkness’, he prowled about the stage in extravagantly hip garb, mercurially cueing his heavily amplified ensemble, creating a delicious aura of mystery and occasional menace. Musically, Davis’s foray into fusion divided his fans. Older listeners preferred the Davis of the ’50s and ’60s, whose brilliant bands reinvented and extended the bebop tradition as well as launching such seminal talents as John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock. But change seemed the driving principle of Davis’s artistic and personal life, and embracing rock seemed a necessary progression."

"I don't excuse Miles' conduct any more than I dismiss my willingness, consciously or unknowingly, to indulge it. We mortals breathe incongruity. That I chose to stay with Miles is still, in many ways, confounding to me. And yet I've come to realize that Miles' behavior felt sorely familiar, a song, blaring and dissonant, that I'd learned in my early years. [...] My father had taught me the music. And my mother, in her own way, had emphasized each measure, hummed along with the clamor even as she railed against it. "Men will be men," she'd sometimes mutter, following a feud with my father, her way of rationalizing his adultery. [...] And in my Upper East Side high-rise, a world away from the slum of my girlhood and yet overlapping with it, Miles would be Miles."

"When the world speaks of Miles, the legend, they have no idea who the man really was. The Miles I knew was sensitive and ailing, bruised by the hurts this life metes out. With trembling lips, he told me of the years during his childhood in East St. Louis when he'd been called Blackie by his friends and even some of his family, gazed down upon as a nobody, rendered invisible by his dark hue. He told me of the time, at age thirteen, when he'd been seduced by a grown woman, forced into his first sexual encounter with a friend of a relative. He spoke of the time when his father, a well-to-do dentist, had wanted him to follow in his career path, until a teacher who'd recognized Miles' gift intervened. "Forget it. Little Davis is not going to be any dentist," that teacher told Miles' father. "He's going to be a musician." The first time Miles blew that horn, he'd found his consolation. In playing that trumpet, he did the only thing he knew how, the one thing that made him feel worthy. That is the Miles I knew and, in time, grew to cherish."

"And on one particularly weighty draft he turned in, I told him to go home that night, pour a drink, and listen to some Miles Davis. I told him the thing about Miles Davis is the silences. The notes he doesn’t play. So with that in mind, go take another swing at your draft, find me some silences, and then I’ll get to work."

"Miles said he looked on his need for constant change as a curse. However, Miles, along with Duke Ellington, in terms of looking for models of how you strategize with a band, have been there constantly in the background for me. Not the Beatles as a construct for a group, not Led Zeppelin, not the Floyd. My guides have always been Miles and Duke."

"I would like to hear more of the consummate melodic master, but I feel that big business and his record company have had a corrupting influence on his material. The rock and pop thing certainly draws a wider audience. It happens more and more these days, that unqualified people with executive positions try to tell musicians what is good and what is bad music. It’s tempting for the musician to prejudice his own views when recording opportunities are so infrequent but I for one am determined to resist the temptation."

"Another place I worked a lot was the Open Door, where we used to go to hear Miles. I didn't go to hear Miles; I went to see his wardrobe, because he had gorgeous clothes. He always played into the drapes and showed complete contempt for the audience."