I don’t think I could. Of course I’m saying this on American soil. I’m facing a few more months of work in this city, but at the end of it, I will be returning to South Africa. I would like to believe that if for some reason the situation deteriorated to the point where I was told, “If you leave South Africa, you can never come back,” I’d stay there. There were periods in my life when I could have been seduced away. I am incredibly fortunate that the government took away my passport at the point when I was most open to seduction. With my passport gone, I could have left on a one-way ticket. But the issue was so starkly highlighted that I had no problem in saying, “No.”

Back in Montgomery during my growing up there, it was completely legally enforced racial segregation, and of course, I struggled against it for a long time. I felt that it was not right to be deprived of freedom when we were living in the Home of the Brave and Land of the Free. Of course, when I refused to stand up, on the orders of the bus driver, for a white passenger to take the seat, and I was not sitting in the front of the bus, as so many people have said, and neither was my feet hurting, as many people have said. But I made up my mind that I would not give in any longer to legally-imposed racial segregation and of course my arrest brought about the protests for more than a year.

One thing, it's too big a subject and I want to talk about it on paper if I talk about it at all. But I can say this much, because I thought the life that my father and mother would have had together was cut short and something of what they might have achieved I hope that I'm achieving in my work.

Prisoner of War! That is the least unfortunate kind of prisoner to be, but it is nevertheless a melancholy state. You are in the power of your enemy. You owe your life to his humanity, and your daily bread to his compassion. You must obey his orders, go where he tells you, stay where you are bid, await his pleasure, possess your soul in patience. Meanwhile the war is going on, great events are in progress, fine opportunities for action and adventure are slipping away. Also the days are very long. Hours crawl like paralytic centipedes. Nothing amuses you. Reading is difficult; writing impossible. Life is one long boredom from dawn till slumber. Moreover, the whole atmosphere of prison, even the most easy and best regulated prison, is odious. Companions in this kind of misfortune quarrel about trifles and get the least possible pleasure from each other's society. If you have never been under restraint before and never known what it was to be a captive, you feel a sense of constant humiliation in being confined to a narrow space, fenced in by railings and wire, watched by armed men, and webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions. I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I have ever hated any other period in my whole life. ... Therefore in after years, when I was Home Secretary and had all the prisons of England in my charge, I did my utmost consistent with public policy to introduce some sort of variety and indulgence into the life of their inmates, to give to educated minds books to feed on

I think when the creative person ends, he continues in the next existence. I'm a person who believes this life isn't the be-all and end-all of everything.

I hope so, yes! The thing is that my spiritual leanings don’t accept what we would call life and death… We don’t believe in that. There is no end! There is no dying. We’re here forever! Even though your body turns to dust like everything else in this world, your soul is going to continue on. Even though I’m not able to perform music anymore, I’m still here as a human being, my soul will still be here when I’m gone — so every day I’m trying to be a good human being. And I guess whatever I accomplish in that sense will turn into the legacy of Sonny Rollins.

I realized I wasn’t sounding as good as my reputation was, so I wanted to kind of get to that point where I wouldn’t be ashamed to go on the bandstand, which happened to me one time on a job I was playing with… Elvin Jones, at that time, was the drummer playing with me. We used to go around, had a big sign, “Sonny Rollins is coming to town,” everybody was there, but I didn’t sound good, and I knew I wasn’t playing up to what I should be. So I said, “Okay, I am getting out of here. I am going to go and woodshed,” as they say, and get myself together.

The life of a jazz musician is a difficult life, because you want to play, you want to be, you want to get to the inner spirit and sometimes you drink or you use drugs or you smoke a lot. You do all these things to try to get the spirit out. So it’s a difficult existence and a lot of the great people that I have known, and in history, they kind of over-indulge, and they never sort of are able to balance their musical life with their personal life. Maybe it’s not necessary to do that. That is another question, I don’t know, but I’d like to see young musicians coming up that don’t smoke and that don’t drink to excess and don’t use drugs, and don’t sort of debilitate themselves. I think that’s where we should go. I think that is what guys should be doing. I don’t think you have to drink and use drugs to play good jazz, but that’s been the model for so long that a lot of guys get caught up in that, you know.