Quotes By Quincy Jones

I went with Lionel Hampton for three years. Out of that came a trip to Europe.

I'm never in my life going to do a record that's a tribute to myself. I don't need it.

When I was 14, I was a passenger in a terrible accident.

I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.

I've met every freak in the business.

I'm not a psychiatrist.

Everybody has their idiosyncrasies.

We stole a box of honey jars one time and went out in the woods and took care of the whole box. I don't think I touched honey again for 20 years. I never wanted to see honey again.

We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.

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!

My son is a hip-hop producer.

My father was a carpenter, a very good carpenter. He also worked for the Jones boys. They were not family members, we weren't related at all. They started the policy racket in Chicago, and they had the five and dime store.

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.

I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.

I was married for 36 years but now I'm free.

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.

It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.

I'm just a musician and a record producer.

The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.

Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.

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.

My grandmother had this high-tech security system - a rusty nail she used to lock the door.

I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we've had in a long time. It's sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America.

You make your mistakes to learn how to get to the good stuff.

Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.

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.

You cannot get an A if you're afraid of getting an F.

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.

It's amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don't have anything else to do.