Thelonious Monk

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired and that’s all there is to it.

I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.

Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing even if it does take them 15, 20 years.

I don’t consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further.

I didn’t get my music together until I was 40.

Let me whisper it. Let me sigh it. Let me sing it, my dear or I will cry it.

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.

In Kansas City joints ran 9pm-5am. Pay was a $1.25 a night but somebody special like Count Basie could command $1.50.

Look for the one who’s not smiling and play to that person. Once you’ve got that person, you’ve got the whole club.

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing very powerful emotions. That’s what draws people towards it.

Music should always be an adventure.

I still do what I love, and I don’t really think about it. I try to make a beautiful show, so people go home happy. That’s my biggest aspiration: to make people happy.

Gershwin was right in his time, at his time. Everybody else was behind.

Through Dizzy and Bird I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of their instrument.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales.