Quotes About Quincy Jones

#1. I'm the hip-hop Quincy Jones of today.

Wyclef Jean

#2. People ask, "What do you think about being called Puff Mommy?" Puff's a very successful young man, so I don't have a problem if that's what they wanna call me. If anybody calls me a female Quincy Jones, that's way, way complimentary. That's something I'll cherish for life.

Missy Elliot

#3. My friend Quincy Jones says we won our first Grammys together in 1963. I have no recollection. I don't even remember the room. When he showed me the picture, I remembered what I wore. But it's like awards don't mean anything.

Barbra Streisand

#4. My earliest influence was Quincy Jones. I thought 'The Wiz' soundtrack was the most amazing thing I'd ever heard. It was my first record and you had Michael Jackson, Ted Ross, Nipsey Russell and Diana Ross on it. I even took it to show and tell in third grade!

Jill Scott

#5. At a party in L.A., I met this middle-aged gentleman who I was talking to for ages when I asked, 'So, what do you do?' Turns out I was speaking to legendary music producer Quincy Jones, who worked on Michael Jackson's hits. And there was little old me rattling on - I was so embarrassed.

Elliot Cowan

#6. My mother and I are more than best friends; we are partners in crime. After she and my father, Quincy Jones, separated when I was 10 years old, my sister, Kidada, who was 12, went to live with our dad, and I stayed with my mother.

Rashida Jones

#7. You know, Quincy Jones was a great mentor, but he was a man in a man's world. Fortunately he's a very sensitive man and a beautiful human being, and even though he was 14 or 15 years older than me, he's a capable human being and has great communication skills.

Lesley Gore

#8. I was fortunate enough to hook up with Quincy Jones and had a lot of success. But the music of the '80s really changed when the '90s hit. For me to chase that dream or career of music, I started a family, started on 'Melrose Place,' so it was something I didn't have the time or energy.

Jack Wagner

#9. I met Quincy Jones in Seattle. We were kids together ... liked each other when we met and have been close ever since. He wasn't writing when we met - in fact, I more or less started him off to write; voicing, harmony, and stuff like that.

Ray Charles

#10. I was looking for Quincy Jones, that's who I was obsessed with. Watching Mike [Jackson], I always knew that I had to be a showman on stage, because when people come to you live you always want them to come back. You gotta give them something to remember.

Wyclef Jean

#11. Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

Ice Cube

#12. Sometimes a producer and an artist get together and they make magic like Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson. As far as my own music career - you could liken my chemistry with Timbaland to Marty Scorsese and Robert De Niro.

Justin Timberlake

#13. The reason I wanted to become an organ player was because I heard Ray Charles play on Quincy Jones' arrangement of "One Mint Julep." I heard that sound, and it just struck me. I thought that's what I want to do with my life. That's the sound I want to try to make.

Booker T. Jones

#14. Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.

Nile Rodgers

#15. Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores.

Quincy Jones

#16. Bebop and hip-hop, in so many ways, they're connected. A lot of rappers remind me so much of bebop guys in terms of improvisation, beats and rhymes. My dream is to see hip-hop incorporated in education. You've got the youth of the world in the palm of your hand.

Quincy Jones

#17. Some summers my father would take us down to visit our grandmother in Louisville, who was an ex-slave, Susan Jones, and she had a shotgun shack they call it, and no electricity, a well in the back, a coal stove, kerosene lamps.

Quincy Jones

#18. Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet. I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring.

Quincy Jones

#19. When I was 14, I would sit up in my room and write till my eyes would bleed.

Quincy Jones

#20. We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.

Quincy Jones

#21. Greatness occurs when your children love you, when your critics respect you and when you have peace of mind.

Quincy Jones

#22. When you work with Ray Charles, Billy Eckstine and Frank Sinatra, and you tell them to jump without a net, you better know what you're talking about. Thank God I was ready for it.

Quincy Jones

#23. I have all the tools and gadgets. I tell my son, who's a producer, 'You never work for the machine; the machine works for you.'

Quincy Jones

#24. Everybody, no matter what vocation they're looking at, should add music as an essential to their curriculum. Music can be a very important part of your soul and your growth as a human being. It's so powerful.

Quincy Jones

#25. Let's not get too full of ourselves. Let's leave space for God to come into the room.

Quincy Jones

#26. It slaps your dignity just right. I loved the idea of these proud, dignified black men, and I saw the older ones wounded, and it wounded me ten times as much because I couldn't stand seeing them hurt like this.

Quincy Jones

#27. When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.

Quincy Jones

#28. The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.

Quincy Jones

#29. It's amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don't have anything else to do.

Quincy Jones

#30. I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.

Quincy Jones

#31. Working with kids in Soweto in South Africa, it's rough out there. But the bottom line is you've got to go to know. In Cambodia, there are 10,000 landmines. Same in Afghanistan, same in Colombia. I'm totally addicted to traveling.

Quincy Jones

#32. Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.

Quincy Jones

#33. Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?

Quincy Jones

#34. I'm never in my life going to do a record that's a tribute to myself. I don't need it.

Quincy Jones

#35. I don't deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn't deserve that, either. So I'll keep it.

Quincy Jones

#36. When I was 14, I was a passenger in a terrible accident.

Quincy Jones

#37. Melody is king, and don't you ever forget it. Lyrics appear to be out front, but they're not; they're just an accompanying factor. If they're good, you're really in good shape. Lyrics are written to be rewritten.

Quincy Jones

#38. It's very freaky in Chicago.There's something in the water there, I don't know what it is. But the actual word Chicago means, in the Indian language, garlic. It was just garlic and mosquitoes there.And that is the roughest city on the planet, and I been to every place in the world.

Quincy Jones

#39. When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.

Quincy Jones

#40. Excellence isn't an act, it's a habit

Quincy Jones

#41. I'm not a psychiatrist.

Quincy Jones

#42. I tell my kids and I tell proteges, always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed, because it's not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever.

Quincy Jones

#43. We stole a box of honey jars one time and went out in the woods and took care of the whole box. I don't think I touched honey again for 20 years. I never wanted to see honey again.

Quincy Jones

#44. I'm just a musician and a record producer.

Quincy Jones

#45. I chose the trombone because the trombone players in the marching band got to be up front with the majorettes (because of the slides) and I loved that!

Quincy Jones

#46. Prince.. a true artist in every sense of the world.Gone way too soon.

Quincy Jones

#47. I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.

Quincy Jones

#48. If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.

Quincy Jones

#49. I never felt like I had a mother.

Quincy Jones

#50. You cannot get an A if you're afraid of getting an F.

Quincy Jones

#51. Playing the game, and unfortunately, playing the gangster game is very profitable.

Quincy Jones

#52. I met Ray Charles at 14, and he was 16. But he was like a hundred years older than me.

Quincy Jones

#53. I've never been bored in my life, man. I've never been bored or lonely. Are you kidding? No way! I'm an orchestrator, a musician, a producer. I love everything. I've studied languages from Farsi to Greek to French, Swedish, Russian ... How can you get bored?

Quincy Jones

#54. Making a record is like painting a school bus with a toothbrush

Quincy Jones

#55. I'm probably the only one in the world you can name that's worked with Billie Holiday, Louie Armstrong, Ella, Duke, Miles, Dizzy, Ray Charles, Aretha, Michael Jackson, rappers. 'Fly Me to the Moon' was played on the moon by Buzz Aldrin. Sinatra. Paul Simon. Tony Bennett. I'm the only one.

Quincy Jones

#56. I live on the Internet.

Quincy Jones

#57. Seattle is like a global gumbo, a melting pot with all kinds of people - the rich, the poor, white people, some Chinese, Filipino, Jewish and black people - they're all here.

Quincy Jones

#58. We were in the heart of the ghetto in Chicago during the Depression, and every block - it was probably the biggest black ghetto in America - every block also is the spawning ground practically for every gangster, black and white, in America too.

Quincy Jones

#59. When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.

Quincy Jones

#60. My earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade.

Quincy Jones

#61. I don't remember feeling love.

Quincy Jones

#62. I don't ever want to grow up. That's boring.

Quincy Jones

#63. A bad song, the three best singers in the world cannot save it, and that's the bottom line.

Quincy Jones

#64. It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

Quincy Jones

#65. I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music - gospel, blues, jazz and R&B - is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I'm telling you.

Quincy Jones

#66. I go to the favelas in Brazil. It's the same in the South Side of Chicago. It's the same, or just more violent. We're trying to get them to stop selling dope. You see kids with AK-47s, and nine-year-olds with nine millimeters. You know, they don't play. They make us look like nuns.

Quincy Jones

#67. A song should have all the color and beauty of every rose.

Quincy Jones

#68. I was inspired by a lot of people when I was young. Every band that came through town, to the theater, or the dance hall. I was at every dance, every night club, listened to every band that came through, because in those days we didn't have MTV, we didn't have television.

Quincy Jones

#69. My son is a hip-hop producer.

Quincy Jones

#70. After I learned the piano, I went on to learn percussion, the tuba, b-flat baritone, French horn, trombone, trumpet, most of the instruments in the orchestra. Trumpet was my instrument.

Quincy Jones

#71. Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.

Quincy Jones

#72. I've always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, "Ain't that the truth."

Quincy Jones

#73. I was the most subtle person in the world.

Quincy Jones

#74. All guys get into music because they love music and they also want to get the girls.

Quincy Jones

#75. After every war, there was a significant change in the music, and I can understand how that happened. If you participate in protecting the country, you think you can be part of it, but you come back home and it's worse than ever.

Quincy Jones

#76. Billy Strayhorn wrote Multicolored Blue. Billy to me is the boss of the arrangers.

Quincy Jones

#77. I was reading Omar Khayyam, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, L. Ron Hubbard, all sorts of philosophy. Bebop cats are like that. Curious. I wanted to know about everything.

Quincy Jones

#78. The process is the most beautiful part.

Quincy Jones

#79. If I don't have a mother, I'll let music be my mother.

Quincy Jones

#80. We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.

Quincy Jones

#81. I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we've had in a long time. It's sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America.

Quincy Jones

#82. Eight kids and a stepmother, and I just wanted to be out of there and so when I got a scholarship from Boston to the Schillinger House, which is now the Berklee School of Music, I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Quincy Jones

#83. Everybody has their idiosyncrasies.

Quincy Jones

#84. Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.

Quincy Jones

#85. Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.

Quincy Jones

#86. You make your mistakes to learn how to get to the good stuff.

Quincy Jones

#87. It's the attitude about life, man. Looking at the light instead of the dark. Looking at love instead of fear.

Quincy Jones

#88. I found this out over the years, that racism is a thinly veiled disguise over economics and money. It really is.

Quincy Jones

#89. I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.

Quincy Jones

#90. A person's age can be determined by the degree of pain he experiences when he comes in contact with a new idea.

Quincy Jones

#91. I was rapping in 1939. It's old. The roots are complex. And kids don't know.

Quincy Jones

#92. The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.

Quincy Jones

#93. I like all music. The only music I don't like is bad music.

Quincy Jones

#94. Empty the cup every time and it comes back at twice as full. I developed that attitude when I was very, very young, when I decided I didn't want to be a gangster anymore. Whether it's just shining shoes, I said okay, I'm going to do this better than anybody else did it in my life.

Quincy Jones

#95. Michael (Jackson) was so shy, he'd sit down and sing behind the couch with his back to me while I sat with my hands over my eyes-and the lights off.

Quincy Jones

#96. I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.

Quincy Jones

#97. I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.

Quincy Jones

#98. Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'

Quincy Jones

#99. I went with Lionel Hampton for three years. Out of that came a trip to Europe.

Quincy Jones

#100. When you're over the hill, that's when you pick up speed.

Quincy Jones