Quincy Jones Quotes
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I'm just a musician and a record producer.
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If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.
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When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.
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You want your parents to say, "Hey, I'm proud of you." When you don't hear that, you learn to compensate. You say, "Hell, I don't need their approval. If I get my music right, I'll have everyone else's approval." I didn't understand it then, but I now know that's what happened to me.
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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.'
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If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.
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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.
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I like all music. The only music I don't like is bad music.
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I was rapping in 1939. It's old. The roots are complex. And kids don't know.
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I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we've had in a long time. It's sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America.
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I'm never in my life going to do a record that's a tribute to myself. I don't need it.
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I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.
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I'm probably the only one in the world you can name that's worked with Billie Holiday, Louie Armstrong, Ella, Duke, Miles, Dizzy, Ray Charles, Aretha, Michael Jackson, rappers. 'Fly Me to the Moon' was played on the moon by Buzz Aldrin. Sinatra. Paul Simon. Tony Bennett. I'm the only one.
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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.
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My grandmother had this high-tech security system - a rusty nail she used to lock the door.
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I have all the tools and gadgets. I tell my son, who's a producer, 'You never work for the machine; the machine works for you.'
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I'm not a psychiatrist.
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Young people should travel, and they don't. You can't know if you don't go.
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I'm a tremendous believer and supporter in hip-hop and rap.
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You make your mistakes to learn how to get to the good stuff.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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When I was 14, I was a passenger in a terrible accident.