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

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" 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'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from. "

" I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs. "

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

" 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. "

" I never cared about money or fame, and I don't care now. I follow the groove, and money always follows. "

" I like all music. The only music I don't like is bad music. "

" My grandmother had this high-tech security system - a rusty nail she used to lock the door. "

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

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

" 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 rapping in 1939. It's old. The roots are complex. And kids don't know. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we've had in a long time. It's sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America. "

" I hope that on my tombstone it says 'Born 1933, died 2043.' I hope that's my legacy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Young people should travel, and they don't. You can't know if you don't go. "

" I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins. "

" My son is a hip-hop producer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Everybody, no matter what vocation they're looking at, should add music as an essential to their curriculum. Music can be a very important part of your soul and your growth as a human being. It's so powerful. "

" I've never been bored in my life, man. I've never been bored or lonely. Are you kidding? No way! I'm an orchestrator, a musician, a producer. I love everything. I've studied languages from Farsi to Greek to French, Swedish, Russian... How can you get bored? "

" Melody is king, and don't you ever forget it. Lyrics appear to be out front, but they're not; they're just an accompanying factor. If they're good, you're really in good shape. Lyrics are written to be rewritten. "

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