Stanley Crouch

“All of us are experts at blaming others for our own shortcomings.”

“Part of what you have to do is you have to be willing to be a fool, and you have to be willing to try things that are not going to work.”

“Race is an invention. It's a fairy tale.”

“If you are not willing to be a fool, you can't be a master.”

“Self-pity is the most destructive of all narcotics.”

“The joy of art is that it is a point of connection.”

“Heroism is not blind courage. It is creative courage.”

“The thing that you learn in any kind of art is that the things that you might think are mistakes are, in fact, the portals of discovery.”

“Jazz is the art of thinking in time.”

“We are living in a time in which movies are more important than ever. It's a universal language.”

“The problem is not to get rid of the past. The problem is to make it useful.”

“Blues is a sacred music. It's a sacred, secular music.”

“You can't be a jazz musician if you don't have a sense of humor.”

“Ideology is a drag.”

“The pursuit of the heroic is a central theme in all of art.”

“The high-minded pursuit of artistic, scientific, and moral truth is often messy.”