Louis Armstrong

What we play is life.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

There are some people that if they don’t know, you can’t tell them.

There is two kinds of music, the good and the bad. I play the good kind.

Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

I thought I had swell ideas and wonderful musicians but no one else did.

Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.

Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a look into our redemptive future possibilities.

I don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

The high note is not the only thing.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an’ my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.

Too many young musicians today want to win polls before they learn their instruments.

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

What a fool I am to think my breaking heart could kid the moon.

But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn’s 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn’s 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.