Sometimes you have to take a thing when it comes and be glad. I first began to feel this way in ’57, when I started to get myself together musically, although at the time I was working academically and technically. John Coltrane Read Quote
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. John Coltrane Read Quote
I’ve always felt that even though a man was not a Christian, he still has to know the truth some way or another. Or if he was a Christian, he could know the truth. The truth itself doesn’t have any name on it to me. And each man has to find this for himself, I think. John Coltrane Read Quote
I’ve been listening to jazzmen, especially saxophonists, since the time of the early Count Basie records, which featured Lester Young. Pres was my first real influence, but the first horn I got was an alto, not a tenor. John Coltrane Read Quote
My mother had aspirations to become a concert singer. Her Methodist Minister father didn’t approve of young girls leaving home until they married, so she had to pass it up. John Coltrane Read Quote
I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe. John Coltrane Read Quote
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. John Coltrane Read Quote
In any situation that we find in our lives, when there is something that we feel should be better, we must exert effort to try and make it better. So it’s the same socially, musically, politically in any department of our lives. John Coltrane Read Quote
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. John Coltrane Read Quote
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. John Coltrane Read Quote
