Mary Lou Williams Quotes

#1. That's something Mary Lou Williams used to tell me: If you're not feeling right about what you're doing and you play a minor tune it all comes back, falls into place. I don't know if that's true, but I do it.

Marian McPartland

#2. Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

Mary Lou Williams

#3. I wonder what an agent would do if he had to travel with the band he's booking.

Mary Lou Williams

#4. If you can find the line between sympathetic and creepy, you have reached a very funny area.

Jason Segel

#5. Quite a few musicians came to our house. And my ma took me to hear many more, hoping to encourage in me a love of music. But she wouldn't consent to my having music lessons, for she feared I might end up as she had done - unable to play except from paper.

Mary Lou Williams

#6. During the years I was with Andy Kirk we starved almost. I remember not eating for practically a month several times. But we were very, very happy because the music was so interesting, and you forgot to eat, anyway.

Mary Lou Williams

#7. Anything you are shows up in your music - jazz is whatever you are, playing yourself, being yourself, letting your thoughts come through.

Mary Lou Williams

#8. I have been tied up with music for about as long as I can remember. By the time I was four I was picking out little tunes my mother played on the reed organ in the living-room.

Mary Lou Williams

#9. He explained how ridiculous the clowning was, and there and then I decided to settle down and play seriously.

Mary Lou Williams

#10. If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.

William L. McKnight

#11. Offers for me to play dances, society parties, even churches, were now coming in regularly. For most dates I was paid the sum of one dollar per hour, and they always tipped me at the end of the night.

Mary Lou Williams

#12. To me the desire to create and to have control over your own life, irrespective of the politics of the time or social structures, has always been a part of the human spirit. What I did not fully realize was that work could open the doors to my heart.

Anita Roddick

#13. Within a few hours I had them off, was about ready to play the shows. That night I opened, and during the week Harris was over to the house to talk my mother into letting me leave home.

Mary Lou Williams

#14. It takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place.

Lewis Carroll

#15. We don't want a president who fails at domestic and foreign policy.

Pat Robertson

#16. Reduce the light, increase the concentration!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#17. If you work on your talent, the plans will fall in automatically.

Mary Lou Williams

#18. Is it just me, or do you also think this is unnatural behavior in a female parent? Isn't there a federal law that says mothers are not allowed to laugh at vulnerable male children when they are required to wear stupid clothing to work?
There should be.

Ann Edwards Cannon

#19. When Seymour saw me seated at the piano at that first rehearsal, he shouted: 'What's that kid doing here? Call your piano player and let's get started.'

Mary Lou Williams

#20. All of the answers you seek can be found in the macrocosmic view of the microcosmic You.

Ka Chinery

#21. It's not what you play, it's how you play it.

Mary Lou Williams

#22. A teacher had once told them that men were either beasts, gentlemen, or beasts masquerading as gentlemen. Might there be a fourth category - gentlemen masquerading as beasts?

Sabrina Jeffries

#23. One way and another I was having a ball - playing gigs, jamming and listening to fine musicians. Then came a crisis at home. My stepfather fell sick, and it meant I had to support the family.

Mary Lou Williams

#24. People say, 'I love 'Snatch,' I love 'Lock Stock,' but I want to be more than a movie name. I'd love to be more of a household name.

Vinnie Jones