Ani DiFranco

Stop before you’re done.

I loved the feeling that I got singing.

If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!

The more you play, the more you hear and the more you hear, the more you want to play.

Once you have been bitten by the Jazz bug, it is not a choice anymore.

[on Django Reinhardt] This was a man who changed my musical life by giving me a whole new perspective on the guitar and, on an even more profound level, on my relationship with sound…During my formative years, as I listened to Django’s records, especially songs like ‘Nuages’ that I would play for the rest of my life, I studied his technique. Even more, I studied his gentleness. I love the human sound he gave his acoustic guitar.

Last time I saw Count Basie, he was in a wheelchair. They wheeled him up onto the stage, he sits down at the piano, and he gives the downbeat, and that band played like they were in heaven. And right in the middle, the band cuts. He had to take one hand and put the other on it, and he comes down with one note. And it was the greatest note I ever heard in my life.

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.

I don’t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don’t know.

I bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I used with a small Gibson amplifier.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

Inspiration grows into full-scale creation through persistence and imagination.

No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.

Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.