Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.

I grew up watching American films, listening to American music, and it's a big contribution to the rest of the world. I mean, American jazz, for me, is the best thing culturally that America has produced.

I don't know where jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own.

I'm always trying to come up with something new and unique. I do a beatbox with a harmonica.

Comedy is the ultimate truth. Jazz is hitting the notes that that no one else would hit, and comedy is saying words that no one else would say.

One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.

Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.

It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.

I think jazz is actually quite unforgiving in its disdain for nostalgia. It demands creativity and change at its highest level.

Well, I think, you know, the arts are really what - one of the things that make this country strong. We always think it's our economy or our military power, but in fact, I think it's our culture, our civilization, our ideas, our creativity.

Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.

Once we're inside a tune, we can do anything with it.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

Diplomacy is a little bit like Jazz. It’s improvisation on a theme.

I like to experiment when it comes to music.

Music dictates culture, and culture dictates music; they go hand in hand.

As a lover of both hip-hop and jazz, I feel like much of the latter community still doesn't truly embrace hip-hop as a musical extension.

I loved the freedom of improvised music.

Jazz voices that unvanquishable, natural will toward creaativity and self-expression, depite everything, in the here and now.

A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there.

Modern European composers...have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly.

Jazz is an octopus. It will take whatever it can use and it will work with it.

The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas... and that negotiation is the art