Quincy Jones Quotes

1. (on Jack Nicholson) Jack had a great sense of humor. He still does. He's crazy and a beautiful guy. I always think it's nice when somebody who's paid his dues, like Jack, makes it. But he hasn't really changed much.

2. Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.

3. My father was a carpenter, a very good carpenter. He also worked for the Jones boys. They were not family members, we weren't related at all. They started the policy racket in Chicago, and they had the five and dime store.

4. I'm not a psychiatrist.

5. Frank (Sinatra) took me to a whole new planet. I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring.

6. (on Michael Jackson) The poor guy's gone. He died younger than me when I produced him. He left something not many people are going to leave.



7. The tragedy of Tupac is that his untimely passing is representative of too many young black men in this country…If we had lost Oprah Winfrey at 25, we would have lost a relatively unknown, local market TV anchorwoman. If we had lost Malcolm X at 25, we would have lost a hustler named Detroit Red. And if I had left the world at 25, we would have lost a big-band trumpet player and aspiring composer - just a sliver of my eventual life potential.

8. If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.

9. You have to know that your real home is within.

10. You have to find your own joy, don't you?

11. I've met every freak in the business.

12. I've always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying "Ain't that the truth". 

13. 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.

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

15. Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.

16. Cherish your mistakes and you won't keep making them over and over again. It's the same with heartbreaks and girls and everything else. Cherish them and they'll put some wealth in you.

17. I've lost 174 people in four years. Last week, it was Abbey Lincoln. Before that Herman Leonard, Hank Jones, Lena Horne, Billy Preston - half these guys were younger than me. Sammy Davis was 64 when he died.

18. "We Are the World"? I said: "I want the best choir I ever heard".

19. 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!


20. (on funerals) Who needs them?

21. We learned a lot of things. We made $63 million. We sent $1 million worth of food to see how it went. They just dumped it on the desert. It spoiled. Hey, it could have been worse than that. We could have sent all the food over there.

22. My son is a hip-hop producer.

23. (on Michael Jackson) I was in London when he sold out the 10 concerts, and then sold out 40 more. He called me. He wanted to bring the kids over. But I was with Mohamed Al Fayed at his place. I said: "I'll see you in Los Angeles." And that was the last time I talked to him.

24. Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing.

25. I'm studying Mandarin now, and Arabic. Open the door to them, and they'll open it to you.

26. It's amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don't have anything else to do.

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





28. (on Michael Jackson) He said: "Quincy doesn't understand the business any more. He doesn't know that rap is dead." But it's OK. It wasn't so obvious then.

29. We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.

30. Soon as it rains, get wet.


31. Frank Sinatra said to me: "Q, live each day like it's your last. And one day you'll be right."

32. When I was 14, I was a passenger in a terrible accident.

33. When you chase music for money, God walks out of the room.

34. Except I think vodka's out of my life for ever. Though they say two glasses of red wine is better than not drinking at all!

35. Bono and I had a twenty-five-minute meeting with the pope for Third World debt relief. The paper said because of that trip we got billions for Mozambique, Bolivia, and the Ivory Coast. Two raggedy-ass musicians - Irish rock 'n' roller and a brother from Chicago. We were haaaaappy. Like a fox eating sauerkraut.

36. 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.

37. We're the only country with no minister of culture.

38. Marlon Brando was nanotechnology. Nanotechnology that's one billion times faster than the computers we have now. That's Marlon.

39. The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.


40. They doubted me on Michael for Thriller. I found the power in being underestimated. It's the greatest place to be.

41. Everywhere in the world, they have kids in the palm of their hand. I put together a curriculum so schools know who rappers are - so kids don't have to pretend to be Columbine neo-Nazis saying: "Yo homie!" on the internet.

42. I don't remember feeling love.

43. I've got a jazz mind, man.

44. Sinatra didn't have any gray. He either loved you or rolled over you with a truck in reverse.

45. You cannot get an A if you're afraid of getting an F.

46. I'm proud of everything I ever made.






47. The music business as we knew it is over. I'm rolling with whatever the reality is.

48. (on Amy Winehouse) We hugged and I said: "Why you got to mess up your life like this?" She said: "I'm gonna be OK. My husband's getting out of jail soon." I said: "Wow! That's a big positive!" She's like Naomi, my other little naughty sister.

49. 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."



50. You make your mistakes to learn how to get to the good stuff.

51. Everybody has their idiosyncrasies.

52. You wanna see my heart? Look at my daughters.

53. (on Lady Gaga) I don't listen to her.

54. I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.

55. I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.

56. My brother died of cancer two years ago, renal cell carcinoma. He was my only real brother and I didn't know what to do. I'd never been so desperate in my life.

57. 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.

58. I never felt like I had a mother.

59. 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.



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

61. I was the most subtle person in the world.

62. Some summers my father would take us down to visit our grandmother in Louisville, who was an ex-slave, Susan Jones, and she had a shotgun shack they call it, and no electricity, a well in the back, a coal stove, kerosene lamps.






63. I moved to Paris in 1957 to study with Nadia Boulanger, and to work for a record company called Barclay Records. That was an incredible experience. I went back in 1959, did a Broadway show and had a whole big band to play with the show.

64. I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.

65. All guys get into music because they love music and they also want to get the girls.

66. 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.


67. I went with Lionel Hampton for three years. Out of that came a trip to Europe.

68. I found this out over the years, that racism is a thinly veiled disguise over economics and money. It really is.





69. The girls loved all the young sailors who came through town, so we used to go visit the destroyers and battleships and aircraft carriers. It was a big navy town, and during the war America was very gung ho, and they were the heroes. The black sailors and soldiers were very stylish.

70. I was inspired by a lot of people when I was young. Every band that came through town, to the theater, or the dance hall. I was at every dance, every night club, listened to every band that came through, because in those days we didn't have MTV, we didn't have television.

71. I'd been in love before - I was always in love.



72. 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.

73. We played juke joints and people would get shot and we'd go through Texas. We always had a white bus driver because we couldn't stop in the restaurants. And sometimes we'd see effigies, like black dummies, hanging by nooses from the church steeples in Texas.

74. 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.



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

76. 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.


77. My grandmother had this high-tech security system - a rusty nail she used to lock the door.

78. 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.

79. I'm a tremendous believer and supporter in hip-hop and rap.


80. Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?

81. Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.

82. 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.

83. I'm just a musician and a record producer.




84. 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.

85. I was married for 36 years but now I'm free.

86. Greatness occurs when your children love you, when your critics respect you and when you have peace of mind.

87. 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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