Thelonious Monk Quotations

I don't know what other people are doing - I just know about me.

I guess, you know, if I didn't make it with the piano, I guess I would've been the biggest bum.

Everybody in all countries tries to play jazz.

I can shoot pool, and I can play ping-pong. I'm pretty good at those games.

We have two kids, my wife and myself.

I'd go stupid collecting and counting my money.

I find my inspiration in myself.

I made the wrong mistakes

Man, that cat [Ornette Coleman] is nuts.

Be-bop wasn't developed in any deliberate way.

I never though much about race.

Jazz is my adventure.

All musicians are potential band leaders.

A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.

Miles'd got killed if he hit me.

I don't know where jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

The piano ain't got no wrong notes.

It can't be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!

I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition.

I always believed in being myself.

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

I played the wrong wrong notes.

Everyone is a genius at being themselves

After two takes you're imitating yourself.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound good.

Its always night, or we wouldn't need light.

Anybody talented in any way - they're called eccentric.

Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.

I don't consider myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can't develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. Take a musician like John Coltrane. He is a perfect musician, who can give expression to all the possibilities of his instrument. But he seems to have difficulty expressing original ideas on it. That is why he keeps looking for ideas in exotic places. At least I don't have that problem, because, like I say, I find my inspiration in myself.

Those who want to know what sound goes into my music should come to NY and open their ears.

At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There's no beat anymore. You can't keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There's a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what's shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand.

I have to listen to New York; I live there. I wasn't born there, but I've been living there all my life.

The only cats worth anything are the cats that take chances.

I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.

A genius is the one most like himself.

Don't play everything (or every time); let some things go by... What you don't play can be more important than what you do.

I didn't know there were 2 ten o'clocks in a day...

The majority of juice-heads and winos and junkies arent musicians.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.

Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.

When I was a kid, some of the guys would try to get me to hate white people for what they've been doing to Negroes, and for a while I tried real hard. But every time I got to hating them, some white guy would come along and mess the whole thing up.

Everyone is influenced by everybody but you bring it down home the way you feel it.

Jazz is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently.

The loudest noise in the world is silence.

Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy

There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.

I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.

Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.