Miles Davis

Music is an addiction.

Stop before you’re done.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!

Don’t worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

Music and life are all about style.

Records used to be documents, but now record companies want product.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

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

Despite the fact I’m a professional performer, it’s true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

Jazz musicians have some outlaw in them somewhere.

It’s easier to copy someone else than to find out how to avoid sounding like someone else.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

Music is a reservoir… of sounds.

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

A wise man practices slowly; but a wiser man practices even slower.

There is nothing more stuntastic than rapping in front of an orchestra.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.