Ornette Coleman Quotes

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Music has many uses and I think the most perfected use that music has is one of a healing quality.

I don't try to please when I play. I try to cure.

Whatever you do, it's over when you do it - but first you have to do it.

The idea is more important than the style you're playing in.

Sound has no parents.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

For me, being an innovator doesn't mean being more intelligent, more rich, it's not a word, it's an action.

I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke.

Making music is like a form of religion for me, because it soothes your heart and increases the pleasure of your brain. Most of all, it's very enjoyable to express something that you can only hear and not see, which is not bad.

You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we've forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We've separated music from life.

I'm interested in music, not in my image. If someone plays something fantastic, that I could never have thought of, it makes me happy to know it exists.

That's what I was trying to say when we were talking about sound. I think that every person, whether they play music or don't play music, has a sound - their own sound, that thing that you're talking about.

I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.

The only thing my mother would say to me about my music - I'd say, "Mom, listen to this," and she'd say, "Junior, I know who you are."

You don't have to worry about being a number one, number two, or number three. Numbers don't have anything to do with placement. Numbers only have something to do with repetition.

Harmelody allows everybody to be an individual who does not have to imitate anybody else.

I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, 'Well if you go out and save your money.' So I went and got - I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I'd bring whatever I made.

I think that those elements - light and sound - are beyond democratic. They're into the creative part of life.

I'm having this conversation with you now. I'm talking, but I'm thinking, feeling, smelling, and moving. Yet I'm concentrating on what you're saying. So that means there's more things going on in the body than just the present thing that the person's got you doing.

It seems the activity of expressing sound to do with music has just started blooming - and because of that, the beginners feel like they're professionals, and the professionals feel like they are beginners, which is very healthy.

No one has to learn to spell to talk, right? You see a little kid holding a conversation with an adult. He probably doesn't know the words he's saying, but he knows where to fit them to make what he's thinking logical to what you're saying.

All the things that human beings suffer from are how their environment treats them, and how the elements of their planet affects their mind and body--like radiation, cancer, and all.