Quotes from Wayne Shorter

I would pass this music store on the way to school, and there was a clarinet in the window, a second-hand one. And I kept asking my parents to buy it, and eventually they did. I still have it now.

Jazz is a fighter. The word 'jazz' means to me, 'I dare you. Let's jump into the unknown!'

When they say 'jazz,' I'm thinking of a word called 'the creative process.' It intersects every vein and tributary, avenue, path, that everyone's living. It crosses through there, but it's been contained.

A lot of people don't know that Beethoven, when he wrote the Fifth Symphony, that second movement, he took eight years to figure that out!

I'm trying to do music which inspires the desire to transcend politics, which has a limited and selfish and egoist and unknowledgable end about what anyone knows about existence.

You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, 'Yes, where are you going?' And he says, 'I want a ticket to nowhere.' I thought: that's it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.

When you play with Miles, you are on your own, and then it's you who decides what to contribute.

I think the music that's called 'future stuff' is the soundtrack to the few people who have the nerve and the courage to continue, to go to the end of the line and not be deterred.

Music is just sound - what's more important to me is behavior. I'm watching these play-offs - basketball - it's interesting to watch behavior, underneath all the movements and everything like that. They go into the audience and show some of the parents of the players and all that.

I think that music opens portals and doorways into unknown sectors that it takes courage to leap into. I always think that there's a potential that we all have, and we can emerge, rise up to this potential, when necessary. We have to be fearless, courageous, and draw upon wisdom that we think we don't have.

I believe in everyone staying as they are, and when you meld together, you get something more accurate and democratic.

There's a steady forward march of a creative process that some of us stay with and don't give up - that should be an admirable thing - from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker to Miles to Ornette and some people who are not even known today - some kids coming up - people who are out to change the world.

I know Ornette was playing violin sometimes - that was his bridge into the classical world, to break up that whole pecking order.