Quincy Jones Quotes
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If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.
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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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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 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 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 just a musician and a record producer.
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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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My grandmother had this high-tech security system - a rusty nail she used to lock the door.
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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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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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I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.
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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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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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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 earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade.
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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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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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My son is a hip-hop producer.
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You make your mistakes to learn how to get to the good stuff.
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I'm a tremendous believer and supporter in hip-hop and rap.
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You cannot get an A if you're afraid of getting an F.
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I lost my mother when I was 7 and they put her in a mental hospital. My brother and I watched her being taken away in a strait jacket. That's something you never forget. And my stepmother was like in the movie 'Precious.' I couldn't handle it. So I said to myself, 'I don't have a mother. I don't need one. I'm going to let music be my mother.'
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When I was 14, I was a passenger in a terrible accident.