"The Sun Ra Guide" by John F. Szwed in The Village Voice"

“Interview by Jennifer Rycenga”

“I never wanted to be a part of planet Earth, but I am compelled to be here, so anything I do for this planet is because the Master-Creator of the Universe is making me do it. I am of another dimension. I am on this planet because people need me.”

“Music is not material. Music is Spiritual.”

“I probably do what I'm controlled to do. Something … made all this: some Impossibility without a name. That's what the world is controlled by: an Impossibility. It's controlled by someone they call "God" who never had a beginning and naturally had no end. And in a sense He doesn't exist, because of the standards of reality, because everybody knows something can't just happen — but if there is a God, that's what happened; just happened to be, and without ever having not been — they got to face that.”

“I think of myself as a complete mystery. To myself.”

“People have a lot more of the unknown than the known in their minds. The unknown is great; it's like the darkness. Nobody made that. It just happens. Light and all that — someone made that; it's written that they did. But nobody made the darkness. My music is about dark tradition. Dark tradition means a lot more about than black tradition. There's a lot of division in what they call black. I'm not into division. I'm into coordination, discipline and tradition.”