Nelson Riddle

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

I could write six songs in one day with everything that’s going on.

Lionel Richie told me forget about the critics. But if you come back with hit after hit, you don’t have to worry about anything.

I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.

Music doesn’t have to hop to be hip, as long as it swings it sings.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

I saw music as a way to entertain people and take them away from their daily lives and put smiles on their faces, as opposed to what I see it being now, which is a way for me to actually communicate, and a way for me to tap into my subconscious.

The Jazz Age became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.

Jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

A great song can pull me out of a slump and lighten my heart.

Have you ever wondered why young people take to music like fish to water? Maybe it’s because music is fun, plain and simple.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

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.