"You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail."

"Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you."

"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."

"Any musician who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar. When I get too much to drink, I can't even finger well, let alone play decent ideas. ... You can miss the most important years of your life, the years of possible creation."

"l'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time at the time, and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn't play it. ... I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive."

"When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again."

"[On the question "Is bird imitation valid in jazz?"] I don’t know if it's valid in jazz, [...] but I enjoy it. It somehow comes in as part of the development of what I'm doing. Sometimes I can't do it. At home [in California] I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I would stop what I was working on and play with the birds."

"I have won several prizes as the world’s slowest alto player, as well as a special award in 1961 for quietness."

"You're beginning to sound like a cross between David Frost and David Susskind, and that is a cross I cannot bear."

"Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught."

"I could only write at the beach, and I kept getting sand in my typewriter."

"Well, that I'm not playing better."

"Sometimes I get the feeling that there are orgies going on all over New York City, and somebody says, `Let's call Desmond,' and somebody else says,'Why bother? He's probably home reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.'"

"Not for me. If I want to tune everybody out, I just take off my glasses and enjoy the haze."

"It's like living in a house where everything's painted red."

"I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was."

"I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast."

"I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini."

"I hate the way he writes. I kind of love the way he lives, though."