Herbie Hancock

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.

Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

I try to practice with my life.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

I love songs that are very autobiographical.

If you have something in your life worth celebrating, you can put it in a blues song.

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. Then I’m grateful.

Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.

One way or the other, if you want to find reasons why you shouldn’t keep on, you’ll find ’em. The obstacles are all there; there are a million of ’em.

Trying to play the new concept with a outward bound feeling.

I don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

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

I’ve always depended upon my own melodic instinct, instead of scale like formulas.

In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. They are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.

Spontaneously composed music is a counterpoint that has its own rules based on a natural order and intuitive logic.

It’s like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.