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"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."
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"I am alive because you want me to."

"Life before consciousness was like blank paper, so be it."

"He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree."

"Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part."

"You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all."

"Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him."
Explore more quotes by Ornette Coleman

"I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you're going to do it but when you do it."

"It just makes that person feel that what his work is is going to be more valid. But who wants to see a guy standing in front, looking like a bum, doing something that a bums don't do? This don't make sense."

"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?'"

"Most of my relationships have been like that - with record companies. I've never had a legitimate business relationship with a company. I've always had a personal relationship with someone in the company."

"I don't know what they're thinking about. Just because someone says, 'I like what you do' or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I've had that experience with record companies."

"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."

"After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player."

"Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.'"

"I remember once I read a book on mental illness and there was a nurse that had gotten sick. Do you know what she died from? From worrying about the mental patients not being able to get their food. She became a mental patient."
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