A good list.

• Jaco Pastorius — "It ain't braggin' if you can back it up!"
• Miles Davis — "Those songs to me don't exist, you know? So What or Kind of Blue, I'm not going to play that shit, those things are there. They were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It's over; it's on the record."
• Thelonious Monk — "I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want — you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing — even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years."
• Oscar Peterson — "We're not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour."