Ira Gershwin

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

Love is sweeping the country.

I’m just trying to create context for me to improve my musicianship.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

When you begin to teach jazz, the most dangerous thing is that you tend to teach style…I had eleven piano students, and I would say eight of them didn’t even want to know about chords or anything – they didn’t even want to do anything that anybody had ever done, because they didn’t want to be imitators. Well, of course, this is pretty naive…but nevertheless it does bring to light the fact that if you’re going to try to teach jazz…you must abstract the principles of music which have nothing to do with style, and this is exceedingly difficult. So there, the teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music.

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

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

Love is sweeping the country.

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.

I got out of the car and there was a knife in my neck. The guy says, “Don’t move.” And the drummer got out of the car, and he got a gun in his head. This was my entrance to the South Side of Chicago. But it was necessary, because I wanted to play jazz.

Play the music not the instrument.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.