Quincy Jones

Musician

1933-03-14

Quotes by Quincy Jones

• The only justification for looking down on anyone, is that you're going to stop and pick them up.

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• The only justification for looking down on anyone, is that you're going to stop and pick them up.

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• I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music - gospel, blues, jazz and R&B - is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I'm telling you.

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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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• When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.

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• I was the most subtle person in the world.

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

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• I've never been bored in my life, man. I've never been bored or lonely. Are you kidding? No way! I'm an orchestrator, a musician, a producer. I love everything. I've studied languages from Farsi to Greek to French, Swedish, Russian... How can you get bored?

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

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

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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 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.

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• I hope that on my tombstone it says 'Born 1933, died 2043.' I hope that's my legacy.

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• 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.

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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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• 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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• Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'

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• Working with kids in Soweto in South Africa, it's rough out there. But the bottom line is you've got to go to know. In Cambodia, there are 10,000 landmines. Same in Afghanistan, same in Colombia. I'm totally addicted to traveling.

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

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