Jones

Quincy Jones (b. 1933)

• Ego is just over-dressed insecurity.
• Greatness occurs when your children love you, when your critics respect you, and when you have peace of mind.
• You have to know that your real home is within.
• Young people should travel, and they don’t. You can’t know if you don’t go.
• Always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed because it’s not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever.
• I never cared about money or fame, and I don’t care now. I follow the groove, and money always follows.
• You cannot get an A if you’re afraid of getting an F.
• When I was 14, I would sit up in my room and write till my eyes would bleed.
• I believe that a hundred years from now, when people look back at the 20th century, they will look at Miles, Bird, Clifford Brown, Ella and Dizzy, among elders as our Mozarts, our Chopins, our Bachs and Beethovens.
• Racism is a thinly veiled disguise over economics and money.
• If architecture is frozen music, then music must be liquid architecture.
• I’ve always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying ‘Ain’t that the truth!’
• I met Ray Charles at 14 and he was 16. But he was like a hundred years older than me.
• Everybody, no matter what vocation they’re looking at, should add music as an essential to their curriculum. Music can be a very important part of your soul and your growth as a human being. It’s so powerful.
• My earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade.
• My grandmother had a high-tech security system: a rusty nail she used to lock the door.
• A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer — you put a great song on top of that, you’re really in great shape!
• I’m a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.
• I’ve met every freak in the business.
• Every country can be defined through their food, their music, and their language. That’s the soul of a country.
• You make your mistakes to learn how to get to the good stuff.
• It’s amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don’t have anything else to do.
• Cherish your mistakes, and you won’t keep making them over and over again. It’s the same with heartbreaks… Cherish them, and they’ll put some wealth in you.
• I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.
• I don’t ever want to grow up. That’s boring.
• There are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music.
• Every day, my Daddy told me the same thing: ‘Once a task is just begun, never leave it till it’s done. Be the labour great or small, do it well or not at all.’
• Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.
• Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing.
• The only justification for looking down on anyone, is that you’re going to stop and pick them up.
• I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music — gospel, blues, jazz, and R&B — is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I’m telling you.
• Without the Fender bass, there’d be no rock n’ roll or no Motown. The electric guitar had been waiting ’round since 1939 for a nice partner to come along. It became an electric rhythm section, and that changed everything.
• I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.
• I’ve never been bored in my life, man. I’ve never been bored or lonely. Are you kidding? No way! I’m an orchestrator, a musician, a producer. I love everything. I’ve studied languages from Farsi to Greek to French, Swedish, Russian… How can you get bored?
• After every war, there was a significant change in the music, and I can understand how that happened. If you participate in protecting the country, you think you can be part of it, but you come back home and it’s worse than ever.
• I lost my mother when I was 7 and they put her in a mental hospital. My brother and I watched her being taken away in a straight jacket. That’s something you never forget… So I said to myself, ‘I don’t have a mother. I don’t need one. I’m going to let music be my mother.’