Quincy Jones Quotes

I've always had a little bit of darkness, and I've always been someone who was grieving. I had kind of had a tumultuous upbringing living in an abusive home, so for me, writing has always been a point of catharsis.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

I come from a broken home. My parents split up when I was nine. Everyone gave me a good wallop. But I come from a time when you just put up with that, you got on with things rather than sitting moaning about them.

It's extraordinary what children put up with. I happened to see two of my uncles put my father up against the wall of my grandmother's house and knock his teeth out, because he'd been unpleasant to my mother. The next day I went upstairs and found my father making a rather half-hearted attempt to gas himself.

I pretended I was living with a television family and there was no yelling at home and no one hit me.

Children are often the silent victims of drug abuse.

The reason I'm not more political is because I have music. And from a young age, I needed it. After prison, my father came to America, joined the Army, fought in Vietnam - and was exposed to Agent Orange. He died a slow, horrible death. Music was my escape.

I had a husband who, I'm convinced, was an undiagnosed manic depressive. He didn't treat me as if I had a brain - I was just this beautiful little doll he could show off.

I came from a tough childhood. There was a lot of stuff that I'd actually forgotten or that I'd blocked or hidden away until I started addressing it.

It is painful to relive things that have caused emotional crises or whatever and find ways to express that musically.

I know I have a very self-destructive tendency since my mother died, I have got to be honest.

I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me, 'Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin.'

After my father died when I was seven and my mother entered into an abusive relationship, I shuffled between houses - staying with friends, families from church, and relying on the kindness of teachers and people throughout my community to help me grow up essentially without parents.

It was horrifying. You wouldn't believe how people are treated there. You could see that these people had withdrawn so far that they just lived in their own minds. They did terrible things to themselves.

My mind boggles at the amount of violence inflicted upon children in today's society.

When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life... I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.

So many people suffer from abuse, and suffer alone.

Music for me is not just being on a stage and singing. It's my coping mechanism.

I was an abused kid.

I definitely use my music to kind of alleviate my stress and get me through specific moments in time where I'm just being really tough on myself.

Rap music is really good when you're traumatized.

When someone was hitting me, or like sexually molesting me, it just seemed normal to continue to do that to myself.

Music helped me to get out of a rough period in my life when I really struggled to see any future for myself and was terrified about what was happening to the people around me.

I hated my childhood. It was loathsome. My parents were deaf and dumb. Profoundly so. They could make noises when they were emotionally aroused, but they couldn't form it into speech.

I cry all the time. Music makes me cry.