Thelonious Monk

I find my inspiration in myself.

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 have a definition of Jazz. You’re just supposed to know it when you hear it.

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

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

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

I remember going to sleep many nights with a Gibson catalog, dreaming about getting a Les Paul. I finally did, with a loan from my Dad. It’s a really heavy instrument. But it plays like butter. I met Les backstage at a show once. Jeff Beck made me play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ for Les, which was a little embarrassing. He changed history, big-time.

Talk of God is most often in church. Is there a God outside of church? I hope so. But how should I know? How does anybody know?

You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.

If you want to be a musician, study your craft. Study music.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

If you’re gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.

We didn’t have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free

Art should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise.

I’ll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I’d never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I’d never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn’t much like it at first.

The word “jazz” means to me no category, but when you get stuck into wanting to do something the way it was with the “jazz emblem” or logo chained around your neck, you play in a frozen moment in time and you keep fermenting the ‘fifties saying jazz should be this way or that. Well, if jazz to me means no category, then I’ve got the green light And if it sounds like.. sounds like.. sounds like, and keeps crossing over, it’s what I wanted to do in the first place. I like the way Stravinsky and those guys did things. They expressed something, if not themselves. In fact, some people talk about expression, but expression really doesn’t mean anything to me because there’s a lot of work which goes into building a drama and then it’s up to other people to offer “expression.” Expression is such a nebulous thing.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

Let my children have music.

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

If you can’t play the Blues you might as well hang it up.

Music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and charm and gaiety to life.