Ornette Coleman Quotes
After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player.
Quotes to Explore
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I won't allow myself to have tremendous fear.
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My views on everything from welfare to a balanced budget to affirmative action can be traced to what Buddy and Helen Watts taught me as a young boy growing up poor but proud in Eufaula.
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Well, we like to let down our hair and pep it up at the dances, but we keep it slower when we broadcast. We have to please everybody, and that softer music appeals to the larger amount of people. It's like eating too much cake. You have to have your steak too.
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I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.
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When you are missing someone, time seems to move slower, and when I'm falling in love with someone, time seems to be moving faster.
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Every child needs to have for itself not only its loving parents and siblings and friends of its own age, but a grown-up friend.
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I guess I went into journalism to save the world. I always felt through writing that I wanted to rotate the world slightly.
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I base myself in African-derived music. Blues is one of the modern forms of African music.
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We are an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century.
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If there are negative people around me, I just try to distance myself from that.
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The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy.
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We moved from the East coast to the town of Spokane, Washington, when I was about 13 years old, and I did not adapt very well to the, to the style of the place, and I spent most of my time in the public library.
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So as I was growing up, my father was always in the middle of making a film or preparing a film. It was a full-time, all-consuming type of operation.
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I still think reading something like 'Ulysses' takes a tremendous investment of time, but it repays all of it with so much interest.
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I'm a student of the movies. I'm a student of all media. This is what I do, and I like to immerse myself in what's current and what's topical. And I find that I'm drawn to those things.
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I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.
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Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
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I'm quite adept at writing two or sometimes even three stories at once. So if I get stuck on one story, I switch the next and let my subconscious work on unraveling any plot problems from another story.
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I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since.
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I'm manic-depressive, technically bi-polar II with many borderline features.
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You know when people say, 'How do you go from Kanye to Wiz Khalifa - that's a downgrade.' But the only question I can ask them is: 'Have you ever dated Kanye? Because I have, and believe me, I did not downgrade at all. Not in any aspect, at all.'
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Even if I don't have a job, I work on plays and scenes.
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The skilful employer of men will employ the wise man, the brave man, the covetous man, and the stupid man.
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After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player.
