Dizzy Gillespie Quotes

Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins.

As a musician you have to keep one foot back in the past and have one foot forward into the future.

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds.

The idea of life is to give and receive.

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It's time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It's time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your magnificent indifference.

Jazz will be the classical music of the future.

One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

Mutual respect is so important because as soon as it disappears in relations between you and the next person, there's trouble.

Where there's no mutual respect, there's trouble!

You can't steal a gift. Bird [Charlie Parker] gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.

They're not particular whether you're playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.

I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be.

There have been two great revelations in my life: The first was bepop, the second was homeopathy.

Many critics always saw and heard that my style comes from Roy Eldridge, which is true. But for many things, not only how to play the trumpet but the way to choose the notes, how to play them and how to phrase all of them, I took that from Sweets [Edison]. He really brought something new to the trumpet.

Everyone wants to put people on, I think. And get away with it! That's the thing: put people on and get away with it! That's a science in itself.

Learn to play the piano, man, and then you can figure out crazy solos of your own.

How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don't you ask him? And besides, maybe we'd all like to be like Miles, and just haven't got the guts.

I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be in that particular spot...You have many things to pick from when you're playing, so you try to train yourself to pick out the best things that you know.

Bop is at the end of the road. Now everybody wants dance music.

I used to do a lot of apologizing for what the State Department had done.

We loved one another, man. I mean all those stories about the rift ... there was no question of a rift between Charlie Parker and me.