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"There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time."
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"You can only be twice someone's age once."

"Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went."

"Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance."

"To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us."

"Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long."

"Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age?"

"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories."

"The horse stares at its captor, barely remembering the free kicks of youth."

"There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity."
Explore more quotes by Sonny Rollins


"There have been many great musicians that, Clifford Brown is one great example, I mean he died very early, 25."


"It's all about creation and surprise. It just needs to be appreciated and watered like flowers. You have to water flowers. These peaks will come again."


"I don't want to appear hostile, like I'm hostile to L.A. or that I feel that the people don't appreciate jazz. I don't think it's that. I think it's something more. It's something a little bit more complicated than that."


"What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don't think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact."


"I miss playing with Miles. I did play with him a little while before he left the planet, but even at that time I longed to maybe do some things together."


"My mother came from St. Thomas. I heard that melody and all I did was actually adapt it. I made my adaptation of sort of an island traditional melody. It did become sort of my trademark tune."


"You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives."


"Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there."


"I feel that L.A. has not always been my strongest base for support. That can be for various reasons."


"I guess fortunate that I'm still around and I emphasize I guess because you never can tell what musicians would be playing had they been around as long as I have."
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