Quotes By Quincy Jones
I was inspired by a lot of people when I was young. Every band that came through town, to the theater, or the dance hall. I was at every dance, every night club, listened to every band that came through, because in those days we didn't have MTV, we didn't have television.
Quincy Jones
Every day, my daddy told me the same thing. 'Once a task is just begun, never leave it till it's done. Be the labour great or small, do it well or not at all.'
Quincy Jones
I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.
Quincy Jones
The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.
Quincy Jones
When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.
Quincy Jones
Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.
Quincy Jones
Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing.
Quincy Jones
I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.
Quincy Jones
We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.
Quincy Jones
A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer - you put a great song on top of that, you're really in great shape!
Quincy Jones
After every war, there was a significant change in the music, and I can understand how that happened. If you participate in protecting the country, you think you can be part of it, but you come back home and it's worse than ever.
Quincy Jones
I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.
Quincy Jones
It slaps your dignity just right. I loved the idea of these proud, dignified black men, and I saw the older ones wounded, and it wounded me ten times as much because I couldn't stand seeing them hurt like this.
Quincy Jones
We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.
Quincy Jones