Thelonious Monk

After two takes you’re imitating yourself.

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

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

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.

Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.

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.

When there was vinyl, I just loved opening a record and smelling that wonderful smell.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

After you’ve done all the work and prepared as much as you can, what the hell, you might as well go out and have a good time.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.

The true musician plays what he/she hears. That cannot be a mistake.

I like the interplay in the music.

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.

I listen to everything, I listen to all artists that come along.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.

We usually never got out of there before four or five o’clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.

I’m famous… ain’t that a bitch?

First I was working on classical music that didn’t move me at all. I hated it. So I decided to discover the kinds of classical music that did move me—like Chopin, Satie, Beethoven, and certain Mozart songs. Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy and it made me feel something. That’s when I realized music was inside me.

I am the sum total of everything that I have experienced musically.

I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen.