My grandmother had this high-tech security system - a rusty nail she used to lock the door.
— Quincy Jones
Every day, my daddy told me the same thing. 'Once a task is just begun, never leave it till it's done. Be the labour great or small, do it well or not at all.'
I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.
I was married for 36 years but now I'm free.
I'm not a psychiatrist.
The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.
Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.
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.
We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.
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?
If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.
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.
It's amazing how much trouble you can get in when you don't have anything else to do.
I don't remember feeling love.
I never felt like I had a mother.
If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.
Everybody has their idiosyncrasies.
I'm just a musician and a record producer.
Playing the game, and unfortunately, playing the gangster game is very profitable.
Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.
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.
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.
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.
I went with Lionel Hampton for three years. Out of that came a trip to Europe.
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.
All guys get into music because they love music and they also want to get the girls.
A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer - you put a great song on top of that, you're really in great shape!
Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.
I've met every freak in the business.
I found this out over the years, that racism is a thinly veiled disguise over economics and money. It really is.
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.
When I was 14, I was a passenger in a terrible accident.
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.
My father was a carpenter, a very good carpenter. He also worked for the Jones boys. They were not family members, we weren't related at all. They started the policy racket in Chicago, and they had the five and dime store.
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.
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.
Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing.
