Louis Armstrong Quotes
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Music is life itself. What would this world be without good music? No matter what kind it is.
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If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
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I never want to be anything more than I am; what I don't have, I don't need.
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Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.
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If you still have to ask, shame on you
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The Brick House was one of the toughest joints I ever played in ... Guys would drink and fight one another like circle saws. Bottles would come flying over the bandstand like crazy and there was lots of plain common shooting and cutting. But somehow all that jive didn't faze me at all. I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn.
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The way they're treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.
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Making money ain't nothing exciting to me. ... You might be able to buy a little better booze than some wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you're just as graveyard dead as he is.
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You blows who you is.
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There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them.
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There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.
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Well, I tell you... the first chorus, I plays the melody. The second chorus, I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus, I routines.
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We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.
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I warm up at home. I hit the stage, I'm ready, whether it's rehearsal or anything.
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What we play is life.
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I like kissable lips. A woman's lips must say, 'Come here and kiss me, Pops.'
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I do believe that my whole success goes back to that time I was arrested as a wayward boy at the age of thirteen. Because then I had to quit running around and began to learn something. Most of all, I began to learn music.
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All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.
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The first time I heard Jack Teagarden on the trombone, I had goose pimples all over.
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I was determined to play my horn against all odds, and I had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so.
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Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.
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The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.