Miles Davis

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.

Music and life are all about style.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

I know what I’ve done for music, but don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

Don’t worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.

You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

An artist should write for himself and not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions – one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.

If your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough!

My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed.

I don’t really look at my career in terms of highlights and low lights. I think I’m at this place right now and to be at this place right now I’ve had to go through many obstacles and lots of highs and lows and for me it’s about the entire journey.

Jazz is a music that allows a person to express his deepest, most personal self.

You’re just as beautiful as you feel.

A great song can pull me out of a slump and lighten my heart.

Lionel Richie told me forget about the critics. But if you come back with hit after hit, you don’t have to worry about anything.

You don’t know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything.

One minute we’re over here, the next minute we’re doing something completely different. But it’s interesting because you are producing so many things you couldn’t do with analog.

Jazz and love are the hardest things to describe from rationale.