Kanye West

Yes, we are celebrities, but yes, we’re also innovators, we’re also inventors, we’re also thoughtful.

It’s like when you see all the slave movies. Why you gotta keep reminding us about slavery? Why don’t you show us – put Michael Jordan on a $20 bill.

Come on now! How could you be me and want to be someone else?

This type of soul, this type of art takes a while to cook. It’s like when my wife cooks for me and I always ask for greens. She never wants to cook the greens because they take three hours to cook.

We are following other people’s opinions. We are controlled by the media. And today it all changes.

I’ll take opinions from anyone from Jay-Z to a janitor, and I might value the janitor’s opinion more.

Find the best teachers, listen to the finest playing and try to emulate that. Be true to the music.

[on Ornette Coleman] Man, that cat is nuts!

The other day I came across a recording I made of a night at my apartment when I was living with Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan had been around earlier and we were all passing around the guitar. Whenever it came to my turn I would run into the kitchen and say I’d left the coffee on the stove or something. Shyness. Scared to perform.

I went through a struggle, and I really needed to get myself together and connect with my purpose, which is music.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.

When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn’t go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7.

I don’t dig staying in one groove.

It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.

I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about… Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.

My dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room.

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

I loved the feeling that I got singing.