Miles Davis quotes:

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning... Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

Tom Jones is funny to me, man. I mean, he really tries to ape Ray Charles and Sammy Davis, you know. He's nice-looking; he looks good doing it. I mean, if I was him, I'd do the same thing. If I was only thinking about making money.

I know what I've done for music, but don't call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

My future starts when I wake up every morning.

You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played

A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.

For me, music and life are all about style.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

It's always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don't know where it comes from, it's just there and I don't question it.

Americans don't like any form of art, man. All they like to do is make money. They don't like me, Sammy Davis, or anybody else. They don't like nothing. They just like Sammy because he can make 'em a lot of money.

Coltrane, you cant play everything at once!

Dave [Holland] plays the way he wants to play. And it's usually what's needed. You know, Dave is such a deep thinker. You can't tell him too much, else it might spoil his spirit, you know.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That's a little bit too much.

My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer.

Some day I'm gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up.

I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.

Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging -- but that weren't sweet.

I don't like to hear someone put down dixieland. Those people who say there's no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don't know.

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked.

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads.

I was minding my own business when something says to me, "you ought to blow trumpet." I have just been trying ever since.

Monk was a gentle person, gentle and beautiful, but he was strong as an ox. And if I had ever said something about punching Monk out in front of his face - and I never did - then somebody should have just come and got me and taken me to the madhouse, because Monk could have just picked my little ass up and thrown me through a wall.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

If you don't know what to play, play nothing.

You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four.

I've come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I've never got there. . . . I'm always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play everyday.

I don't care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.

I'm not messing around with nobody's woman. If I want a woman I go get her - you know what I mean?

It takes a long time to sound like yourself.

It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

You can dominate a game if you dominate on the line... We're just going to have to go out there and work hard and blow people off the ball, and let our runners do what they do best.

...people will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype. They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don't look unhip. White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don't understand...That's what I thought was happening when Ornette hit town.

[Prince] could very well be the Duke Ellington of Rock 'n' Roll.

A legend is an old man with a cane...

A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it's going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that's available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.

A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.

All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.

Always listen for what you can leave out.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

As long as I've been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.

At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington.

Audiences - they like colour, you know. I can go out there wearing a red suit, man, and they'll say I'm out of sight ... I think they should be educated; you should always drop something on an audience ... When you get in front of an audience, you should try to give 'em something. After all, they're there looking at you like this. You can't go out and give 'em nothing.

Birth of the Cool' became a collector's item, I think, out of a reaction to Bird and Dizzy's music. Bird and Diz played this hip, real fast thing, and if you weren't a fast listener, you couldn't catch the humor or the feeling in their music. Their musical sound wasn't sweet, and it didn't have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss.

Don't be afraid of mistakes - There are none.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Don't worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

Everybody ought to listen to Benny [Carter]. He's a whole musical education.

First you imitate, then you innovate.

Food makes my mind sluggish.

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.

He sounded to me like he's supposed to be the savior of jazz. Sometimes people speak as though someone asked them a question. Well, no one asked him a question.

I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician.

I always listen to what I can leave out.

I began to realize that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or fours ways, independently of each other, were true because Bach had also composed that way.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

I don't hold it against Dizzy [Gillespie], you know, but if a guy wants to play a certain way, you work towards that. If he stops - he's full of crap, you know. I mean, I wouldn't do it, for no money, or for no place in the white man's world. Not just to make money, because then you don't have anything. You don't have as much money as whoever you're trying to ape; that's making money by being commercial. Then you don't have anything to give the world; so you're not important. You might as well be dead.

I don't pay no attention to what critics say about me, the good or the bad. The toughest critic I got is myself...and I'm too vain to play anything I think is bad.

I like Stan [Getz], because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies - other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he can, which takes a lot of imagination.

I mean, it makes me sick when I see a white man sitting there smiling at me being entertaining, man. When I know what he's gonna do after he gets through. You know, when you see that thing on their face - like: "Entertain me." You know what I mean? Even the black guy that's trying to be white - even he can have that crap on his face.

I really liked Wynton when I first met him. He's still a nice young man, only confused.

I still got my Ferrari.

I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.

I used to enjoy all the white bands when I was a kid listening to the radio. But the record companies, they take music and label it - like, they say "rock". Because the white singers can't sound like James Brown, they call him "soul". They've been doing that for years. That's the prejudice crap.

I would never try and play like Harry James, because I don't like his tone - for me. It's just white. You know what I mean? He has what we black trumpet players call a white sound. But it's for white music ... I can tell a white trumpet player, just listening to a record. There'll be something he'll do that'll let me know that he's white.

If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

If you have to ask, you'll never know.

If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad.

If you love them in the morning with their eyes full of crust; if you love them at night with their hair full of rollers, chances are, you're in love.

If you sacrifice your art because of some woman, or some man, or for some color, or for some wealth, you can't be trusted.

If you're not nervous then you're not paying attention.

If you're trying to be hip, be hip.

I'll play it first and figure out what it's called later.

I'm out there doing the best that I can, My lip is cut and I'm still playing.

In high school I was best in music class on the trumpet, but the prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn.

In improvisation, there are no mistakes.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

It takes you years to learn how to play like yourself.

It took me twenty years study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance. How can she expect to listen five minutes and understand it?

It's like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of s-- is that, but white people's s--?

It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.

I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

Joao Gilberto on guitar could read a newspaper and sound good.

Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery

Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it.

Music is an addiction.

Music is the framework around the silence.

My ego only needs a good rhythm section

People will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype....

Play what you know and then play above that

See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that - but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He's got to play above what he knows - far above it. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It's over; it's on the record.

Sometimes [playing free] doesn't happen, because maybe a guy's wife'll come in, you know, and his ego will catch him. If everybody's completely just straight-without any old ladies over here, a fourth of whisky over there; if it's balanced right, it'll come off. It has to be. But when you get egos involved with playing free, you can't do it.

That was my gift . . . having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it.

That's the way you judge a car, man, [good or bad], when you start it up. It's just the same thing. I mean, I drive a Ferrari - not to be cute, but because I dig it. I'd rather drive a ten-year-old Ferrari than one of them new things-they don't go.

The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them...I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.

The only reason to write a new song is because you're tired of the old ones.

The way you change and help music is by tryin' to invent new ways to play

There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

There are no wrong notes.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then.

We don't play to be seen. I'm addicted to music, not audiences.

We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.

What's swinging in words? If a guy makes you pat your foot and if you feel it down your back, you don't have to ask anybody if that's good music or not. You can always feel it.

When I heard Coleman Hawkins, I learned to play ballads

When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

When the band plays fast, you play slow; when the band plays slow, you play fast.

When you work with great musicians, they are always a part of you . . . their spirits are walking around in me, so they're still here and passing it on to others.

White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything - you know what I mean?

You can tell whether a person plays well or not by the way he carries the instrument, whether it means something to him or not.

You can't compete with Sweets' sound and time feel. It's impossible.