Bill Evans

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

If you take the time and your talent is real, it will last.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument.

Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.

Words are the children of reason and therefore can’t translate the feeling of Jazz because they’re not part of it.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

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

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

I’m glad I don’t have perfect pitch because it can drive you crazy.

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

There’s so much music out there and so many possibilities. I like anyone who plays any instrument.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

I am an improviser, I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it, it’s all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.

Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens.

The Blues is never old.

You can separate the men from the boys and ballads.

Count don’t do nothin’. But it sure sounds good.

Hipness is what it is. But sometimes hipness is what it ain’t.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

For me, the main thing is spontaneity and taking chances.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.