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

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" To me it's no accident that all the symphony orchestras around the world tune up to the note A. And A is 440 cycles, except in Germany where it's 444. But the universe is 450 cycles. So what I'm trying to say is, I think it's God's voice, melody especially. Counterpoint, retrograde inversion, harmony... that's the science and the craft. "

" I think the attraction of 'American Idol' is about the basic human nature attitude that is, 'We can put you up there. But we can take you down.' "

" My earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade. "

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

" If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture. "

" I live on the Internet. "

" 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. "

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

" My son is a hip-hop producer. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know? "

" 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. "

" You cannot get an A if you're afraid of getting an F. "

" After I learned the piano, I went on to learn percussion, the tuba, b-flat baritone, French horn, trombone, trumpet, most of the instruments in the orchestra. Trumpet was my instrument. "

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

" Everybody has their idiosyncrasies. "

" 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. "

" Bebop and hip-hop, in so many ways, they're connected. A lot of rappers remind me so much of bebop guys in terms of improvisation, beats and rhymes. My dream is to see hip-hop incorporated in education. You've got the youth of the world in the palm of your hand. "

" Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores. "

" 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. "

" We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother. "

" 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 met Ray Charles at 14, and he was 16. But he was like a hundred years older than me. "

" When I was 14, I would sit up in my room and write till my eyes would bleed. "

" I believe that a hundred years from now, when people look back at the 20th century, they will look at Miles, Bird, Clifford Brown, Ella and Dizzy, among elders as our Mozarts, our Chopins, our Bachs and Beethovens. "

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

" When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older. "

" All guys get into music because they love music and they also want to get the girls. "

" After every war, there was a significant change in the music, and I can understand how that happened. If you participate in protecting the country, you think you can be part of it, but you come back home and it's worse than ever. "