Chet Atkins

Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.

Do it again on the next verse and people think you meant it.

Everything I’ve ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

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

I loved Billie Holiday more than any other person other than myself on the stage.

I think the most important thing about playing is to walk out with confidence, look the people right in the eye and say ‘Here I am,’ and go and do your thing. As soon as they know you’re confident, they’re confident. As long as you adjust to them you’re not in trouble. You should eyeball them, find out what they want, and give it to them. They didn’t pay to come out and look at the tapestries.

I am the sum total of everything that I have experienced musically.

Sounds of daily life are musical. I try to absorb the intricacies of sounds as if I were listening to music.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

I don’t get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.

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

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.

Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.

If you’re making money people don’t think you’re playing Jazz. When you’re not making money they think you’re a great Jazz musician.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write to ultimately be at peace with himself.

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues,’ they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.