Miles Davis

It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

Stop before you’re done.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!

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

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

After two takes you’re imitating yourself.

It is people’s hearts that move the age.

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

I like people who have worked long and hard, developing through introspection and dedication.

I never believed in a set routine. It should depend on how you feel, because you play what you feel.

When Bird came on the scene, it was shocking as in the Bible: everything was dark and then there was light.

Rather than say I play Jazz, I simply say I play music.

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

When I was coming up, I practiced all the time because I thought if I didn’t I couldn’t do my best.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

There’s so many ways you can hit one note.

Women bring something different to an instrument if they are respectful of their feminine aesthetic.

Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.

First of all, I never strive for identity. That’s something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually.