Louis Armstrong

Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the 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.

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.

When you want ’em you can’t get ’em, when you’ve got ’em, you don’t want ’em.

Check out the albums, … Check out the live performances. That’s the reality of it all. Music is such an energizing thing.

I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I’d shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can’t pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that’s how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

It became a kind of a game, to remember the things that had happened five minutes ago. I would start making notes about the things I was doing, on an instrument that was foreign to me, the guitar, so it was just a fun way of doing cognitive therapy. I was none the wiser to it until I began to improve and my ability to speak began to come back.

Keeping your artistic self as creative as possible is a balancing act.

I love it when people hear my music but can’t figure out what instrument I’m playing.

My chops were not as fast… [but] I just learned more on what was in my mind than what was in my chops. I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it’s the right one, and it will probably whip the guy with twenty notes.

One shouldn’t be in the habit of quoting oneself.

I find my inspiration in myself.

Music was our wife, and we loved her. And we stayed with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands.

Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

You can have tone and technique but without originality you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original.

Jazz is the sound of surprise.