Quotes from John Coltrane

I first met Miles Davis about 1947 and played a few jobs with him and Sonny Rollins at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. During this period, he was coming into his own, and I could see him extending the boundaries of jazz even further.

Sheets of sound. Well, that was when I got tired of certain modulations. Like when you want to get back to C, and you've got to go to D and then G and then C. I was fooling around with the piano, and I figured out some other way to do it.

If you're bourgeois, money is it. It's all the questions and all the answers. Ain't no E-flat or color blue, only $12.98 or $1,000. If it isn't money, it isn't nothing.

Invest yourself in everything you do. There's fun in being serious.

Starting in the middle of a musical sentence and moving in both directions at once.

I think music is an instrument. It can create the initial thought patterns that can change the thinking of people.

You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.

All of the technique doesn't matter... only if the feeling is right.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician.

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist.

Change is inevitable in music - things change.

The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

One positive thought produces millions of positive vibrations.

God breathes through us so completely...So gently we hardly feel it...yet it is our everything.

I think I know what it is but don't ask me to play it

I find it's only when something is trying to come through I really practice. And then, I don't know how many hours. It's all day.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being.

I think that music, being an expression of the human heart, or of the human being itself, does express just what is happening - the whole of human experience at the particular time that it is being expressed.

I start from one point and go as far as possible. But, unfortunately, I never lose my way. I 'localize,' which is to say that I think always in a given space. I rarely think of the whole of a solo, and only very briefly. I always return to the small part of the solo that I was in the process of playing.

Thankfully now, through the merciful hand of God, I do perceive and have been fully reinformed of his omnipotence. It is truly a love supreme.

That's what music is to me—it's just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that's been given to us, and here's an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is.