Artie Shaw

An artist should write for himself and not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

Shoot for the moon. If you miss you’ll still end up in the stars.

I like the music. I love it and live it in fact, but for me the business part just plain stinks.

I can’t understand these guys who just have to have your autograph. I asked one of them ‘What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?’

No matter how carefully and assiduously and how deeply you bury shit, the American public will find it and buy it in large quantity, It’s true, absolutely true.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

I’m not a star. I’m just backing up the cats.

Only play what you hear. If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room – proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.

I used my mother’s radio as a PA system. I’d take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

I try to practice with my life.

It isn’t where you came from, it’s where you’re going that counts.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.

When I was coming up, I practiced all the time because I thought if I didn’t I couldn’t do my best.

My role as a drummer is as a team player to enhance what is going on around me.

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

I have always seen Jazz as innovative.