Carla Bley Quotes

#1. Listening is more important than anything else because that's what music is. Somebody is playing something and you're receiving it. It is sending and receiving.

Carla Bley

#2. Whoever thinks from a distance about his situation lives it with suffering; whoever is close to it lives it with consolation, the fruit of a true wisdom.

Simone Troisi

#3. A pair of skis are the ultimate transformation to freedom

Warren Miller

#4. It would be really hard to get serious about anything political today unless it was a joke.

Carla Bley

#5. I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.

Carla Bley

#6. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#7. I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.

Carla Bley

#8. I don't think you can ever regain your ignorance.

Carla Bley

#9. I write very slowly.

Carla Bley

#10. When there's no more room under the Christmas tree, Ken Foree will have a birthday.

Ken Foree

#11. The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.

Anna Quindlen

#12. I wish that after the war against Saddam Hussein we had been more effective at rebuilding Iraq quickly. I think had we done it from the provinces, in, rather than from Baghdad, out, we might have been more successful.

Condoleezza Rice

#13. From now on I'm thinking only of me."
Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way."
"Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?

Joseph Heller

#14. I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

Carla Bley

#15. One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.

Carla Bley

#16. I don't need much coaxing.

Carla Bley

#17. There are times when what's happening in rock is the best music in the world, and there are times when there is nothing worthwhile at all.

Carla Bley

#18. I got started when I was 3 years old because my father was a music teacher and my lessons were free. Instead of learning to walk, you learn to play the piano.

Carla Bley

#19. Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

Carla Bley

#20. Not everyone voted for me, but the fact that we have so far approximately 32 seats in the 50 seat parliament demonstrates the enthusiasm and the faith and the trust the Fijian people have had for both the track record of my government and FijiFirst manifesto.

Frank Bainimarama

#21. Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker seemed so sophisticated and bad. I wanted to be like that.

Carla Bley

#22. I don't enjoy traveling in America. I don't like the food, the cars. It is not exotic enough. It all tastes a bit like airline food.

Carla Bley

#23. When you have 13 horns, and one is soloing, you have 12 people to play the richest, fullest chord you could ever imagine behind that solo.

Carla Bley

#24. What's interesting about a person without problems?

Carla Bley

#25. When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.

Carla Bley

#26. Because luck comes from within

Vikas Swarup

#27. Ever since Napster I've dreamt of building a product similar to Spotify.

Sean Parker

#28. Too much success can ruin you as surely as too much failure.

Marlon Brando

#29. When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

Carla Bley