Lacey: "Whoever has an original thing to say, it is sort of a threat to the status quo."

Lacey: "Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same."

Lacey: "Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk."

Lacey: "People don't want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately, and this is one of the biggest problems in the world."

Lacey: "Jazz is people's music, a collectivity."

Lacey: "If you have music you want to play that no one asks you to play, you have to go out and find where you can play it. It's called do or die."

Lacey: "Before the work comes to you, you have to invent work."

Lacey: "I've always been extremely lucky in playing with great people who knew much more than I did. That's how I got from there to here."

Lacey: "Circumstances can be very important. Find the right people to work with."

Lacey: "We played for peanuts. But we did what we wanted to do, we heard what we wanted to hear, we performed what we wanted to perform, we learned what we wanted to learn."

Lacey: "You can work on the saxophone alone, but ultimately you must perform with others."

Lacey: "There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language."

Lacey: "I wanted to be a pianist but it just wasn't my thing. I guess I wanted to stand up rather than sit down."

Lacey: "I've been working on the soprano saxophone for 40 years, and the possibilities are astounding. It's up to you, the only limit is the imagination."

Lacey: "I think it is in collaboration that the nature of art is revealed."

Lacey: "The more original something is, the more of a threat it seems until the people catch up with it. That happened with Thelonious Monk. It happened with anybody who is really original."

Lacey: "Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it."

Lacey: "I've performed solo for 20 years now, but I don't do much of it, because if you only play alone, you go crazy and out of tune and play foolish music."

Lacey: "You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use."

Lacey: "When I came up, it was all about originality and collective research. There is an awful lot of imitation going on now."

Lacey: "The potential for the saxophone is unlimited."