Quincy Jones Quotes - Page 4

It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

Billy Strayhorn wrote Multicolored Blue. Billy to me is the boss of the arrangers.

They say a blind hog will find the acorn one day.

I look back and say, "This must have been somebody else." I am not going to tell you that when I was 4, I dreamed about all of this.

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.

A lot of the guys were like that - Oscar Pettiford - they just took me under their wing, and that's why I automatically help young people. I just love it, because they did that for me.

If I don't have a mother, I'll let music be my mother.

I never felt like I had a mother.

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

I was the most subtle person in the world.

It's very freaky in Chicago.There's something in the water there, I don't know what it is. But the actual word Chicago means, in the Indian language, garlic. It was just garlic and mosquitoes there. And that is the roughest city on the planet, and I been to every place in the world.

It was messed up, because in 1947 my family moved to Seattle and I had to get up at 5:00 o'clock in the morning to catch the ferry back to Bremerton every morning because I was Boys Club president.

A bad song, the three best singers in the world cannot save it, and that's the bottom line.

We stole a box of honey jars one time and went out in the woods and took care of the whole box. I don't think I touched honey again for 20 years. I never wanted to see honey again.

Playing the game, and unfortunately, playing the gangster game is very profitable.

Benny [Carter] opened the eyes of a lot of producers and studios, so that they could understand that you could go to blacks for other things outside of blues and barbecue. He's a total musician. He was the pioneer, he was the foundation. He made it possible for that doubt to be taken away.

I got to trumpet, finally. That's why I love to write for brass, and [Count] Basie and [Frank] Sinatra and all that stuff, 'cause that's just like part of my DNA.

I don't remember feeling love.

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.

Whenever a woman would come too close, I would cut her off. Part of that was vindictive - but that was totally subconscious.

The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.

I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.

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

My son is a hip-hop producer.

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.