Quincy Jones Quotes

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Quincy Jones

Profession : Musician

Birth : March 14, 1933

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

Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?

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

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

Quincy Jones

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.

Quincy Jones

We were in the heart of the ghetto in Chicago during the Depression, and every block - it was probably the biggest black ghetto in America - every block also is the spawning ground practically for every gangster, black and white, in America too.

Quincy Jones

I found this out over the years, that racism is a thinly veiled disguise over economics and money. It really is.

Quincy Jones

Everybody has their idiosyncrasies.

Quincy Jones

My earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade.

Quincy Jones

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

Quincy Jones

I'm a tremendous believer and supporter in hip-hop and rap.

Quincy Jones

I didn't understand key signatures or anything, you know. I'd say silly things at the top of a trumpet part like, 'Note, when you play B naturals, make the B naturals a half step lower because they sound funny if they're B naturals.' And some guy said: 'Idiot, just put a flat on the third line and it's a key signature, you know?'

Quincy Jones

To me it's no accident that all the symphony orchestras around the world tune up to the note A. And A is 440 cycles, except in Germany where it's 444. But the universe is 450 cycles. So what I'm trying to say is, I think it's God's voice, melody especially. Counterpoint, retrograde inversion, harmony... that's the science and the craft.

Quincy Jones

I don't ever want to grow up. That's boring.

Quincy Jones

When you work with Ray Charles, Billy Eckstine and Frank Sinatra, and you tell them to jump without a net, you better know what you're talking about. Thank God I was ready for it.

Quincy Jones

Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'

Quincy Jones

I was rapping in 1939. It's old. The roots are complex. And kids don't know.

Quincy Jones

I met Ray Charles at 14, and he was 16. But he was like a hundred years older than me.

Quincy Jones

Young people should travel, and they don't. You can't know if you don't go.

Quincy Jones

Unfortunately, America doesn't have a minister of culture, and I don't understand why. It's really bad for young people.

Quincy Jones