Thelonious Monk quotes:

I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.

I don't know what other people are doing - I just know about me.

I'd go stupid collecting and counting my money.

I can shoot pool, and I can play ping-pong. I'm pretty good at those games.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

The majority of juice-heads and winos and junkies arent musicians.

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.

I don't know where jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

Be-bop wasn't developed in any deliberate way.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.

After two takes you're imitating yourself.

Anybody talented in any way - they're called eccentric.

Everybody in all countries tries to play jazz.

Everyone is a genius at being themselves

I have to listen to New York; I live there. I wasn't born there, but I've been living there all my life.

I made the wrong mistakes

The piano ain't got no wrong notes.

I didn't know there were 2 ten o'clocks in a day...

A genius is the one most like himself.

All musicians are potential band leaders.

At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There's no beat anymore. You can't keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There's a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what's shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand.

Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by... What you don't play can be more important than what you do.

Everyone is influenced by everybody but you bring it down home the way you feel it.

I always believed in being myself.

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

I don't consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can't develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don't have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself.

I find my inspiration in myself.

I never though much about race.

I played the wrong wrong notes.

I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.

I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition.

It can't be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!

Its always night, or we wouldn't need light.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

Jazz is my adventure.

Jazz is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently.

Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.

Man, that cat [Ornette Coleman] is nuts.

Miles'd got killed if he hit me.

Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy

The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound good.

The loudest noise in the world is silence.

The only cats worth anything are the cats that take chances.

There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.

Those who want to know what sound goes into my music should come to NY and open their ears.

Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.

We have two kids, my wife and myself.

Whatever you think can't be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.

When I was a kid, some of the guys would try to get me to hate white people for what they've been doing to Negroes, and for a while I tried real hard. But every time I got to hating them, some white guy would come along and mess the whole thing up.