Top 40 Quincy Jones Quotes

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?

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!

We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.

When you work with Ray Charles, Billy Eckstine and Frank Sinatra, and you tell them to jump without a net, you better know what you’re talking about. Thank God I was ready for it.

Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores.

I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.

Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they’re 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?

I was married for 36 years but now I’m free.

I travel like a maniac. I travel more than anyone I know. I love learning the languages.

I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.

We were in the heart of the ghetto in Chicago during the Depression, and every block – it was probably the biggest black ghetto in America – every block also is the spawning ground practically for every gangster, black and white, in America too.

I was rapping in 1939. It’s old. The roots are complex. And kids don’t know.

If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.

The climate in the ’50s and ’60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.

It’s amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don’t have anything else to do.

When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That’s the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.

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.’

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.

Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of ‘the dozens.’

I’m a tremendous believer and supporter in hip-hop and rap.

I went with Lionel Hampton for three years. Out of that came a trip to Europe.

I don’t remember feeling love.

When you produce an album, you’re dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.

China’s got a billion people and a hit record over there is a million records. You know that ain’t right.

It slaps your dignity just right. I loved the idea of these proud, dignified black men, and I saw the older ones wounded, and it wounded me ten times as much because I couldn’t stand seeing them hurt like this.

After I learned the piano, I went on to learn percussion, the tuba, b-flat baritone, French horn, trombone, trumpet, most of the instruments in the orchestra. Trumpet was my instrument.

We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.

I live on the Internet.

My son is a hip-hop producer.

I met Ray Charles at 14, and he was 16. But he was like a hundred years older than me.

I was reading Omar Khayyam, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, L. Ron Hubbard, all sorts of philosophy. Bebop cats are like that. Curious. I wanted to know about everything.

Working with kids in Soweto in South Africa, it’s rough out there. But the bottom line is you’ve got to go to know. In Cambodia, there are 10,000 landmines. Same in Afghanistan, same in Colombia. I’m totally addicted to traveling.

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.

I’ve met every freak in the business.

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.

I tell my kids and I tell proteges, 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.

My earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade.

Cherish your mistakes, and you won’t keep making them over and over again. It’s the same with heartbreaks and girls and everything else. Cherish them, and they’ll put some wealth in you.

Young people should travel, and they don’t. You can’t know if you don’t go.

I was inspired by a lot of people when I was young. Every band that came through town, to the theater, or the dance hall. I was at every dance, every night club, listened to every band that came through, because in those days we didn’t have MTV, we didn’t have television.