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"I'm having this conversation with you now. I'm talking, but I'm thinking, feeling, smelling, and moving. Yet I'm concentrating on what you're saying. So that means there's more things going on in the body than just the present thing that the person's got you doing."
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"I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black."

"Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills."

"It is a scientific fact that your body will not absorb cholesterol if you take it from another person's plate."

"The body is not a reliable friend."

"The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction."
Explore more quotes by Ornette Coleman

"So, for instance, if you came to me, I'd ask,'Do you want to write? Do you want to improvise? Why do you want to play this instrument? What do you want to do?'"

"I've been playing with Blackwell over 20 years. We used to play when I first went to Los Angeles. Blackwell plays the drums as if he's playing a wind instrument. Actually, he sounds more like a talking drum."

"Even when you write it, someone's got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you're still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I'm really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything."

"I don't really live like a musician myself. I think music is just something that I do, but I'd like to be doing lots of other things. I like to cure all kinds of illness."

"I've never had a relationship with a record executive. I always went to the record company by someone that liked my playing. Then they would get fired, and I'd be left with the record company. And then - because they got fired - the record company wouldn't do anything for me."

"I remember once, we got an interview, and he said, 'Dad, these people are writing about me like I'm an adult. Don't they know I'm a kid?' I have never tried to encourage him to get a music image like other musicians have."

"I decided, if I'm going to be poor and black and all, the least thing I'm going to do is to try and find out who I am. I created everything about me."

"All the things that human beings suffer from are how their environment treats them, and how the elements of their planet affects their mind and body - like radiation, cancer, and all."

"To me, human existence exists on a multiple level, not just on a two-dimensional level, not just having to be identified with what you do and what you say."

"That's what I was trying to say when we were talking about sound. I think that every person, whether they play music or don't play music, has a sound - their own sound, that thing that you're talking about."
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