If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

If you have to ask, then you'll never know (when asked 'what is jazz?')

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.

We never did try to get together and to show the younger Negroes such as myself, to try and even to show that he has ambitions - and with just a little encouragement, I could have really done something worthwhile. But instead, we did nothing but let the young upstarts know that they were young and simple, and that was that.