Miles Davis Music Quotations

Music is an addiction.

It's always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don't know where it comes from, it's just there and I don't question it.

When you work with great musicians, they are always a part of you . . . their spirits are walking around in me, so they're still here and passing it on to others.

You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played

Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it.

I really liked Wynton when I first met him. He's still a nice young man, only confused.

Everybody ought to listen to Benny [Carter]. He's a whole musical education.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That's a little bit too much.

I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.

You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport Festival.

I began to realize that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or fours ways, independently of each other, were true because Bach had also composed that way.

Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It's over; it's on the record.

Joao Gilberto on guitar could read a newspaper and sound good.

There are no wrong notes.

I don't care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

If you're trying to be hip, be hip.

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!

If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!

A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.

I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician.

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads.

My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer.

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.

A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

...people will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype. They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don't look unhip. White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don't understand...That's what I thought was happening when Ornette hit town.

I'll play it first and tell you what it is later.

I'll play it and tell you what it is later.

For me, music and life are all about style.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

Music is the framework around the silence.

We don't play to be seen. I'm addicted to music, not audiences.

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

To keep creating you have to be about change.