Dizzy Gillespie Quotes

I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

The way we're going about things and what we want to do, we feel it has to be a really pure essence of music. That's where you get the most out of it.

The principle of parsimony is valid esthetically in that the artist must not go beyond what is needed for his purpose.

I'm trying to take pictures of less and less.

I try not to bring in anything I don't love looking at. It's about restaint ... There is something about an unfinished quality that leaves within you that sense of possibility.

I've spent my life trying to make things simpler. Because I find ultimately that complicated doesn't reach the heart.

You can't be minimalist as a director until you have acquired the experience and confidence to say no.

I have my own definition of minimalism, which is that which is created with a minimum of means.

I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don't try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary.

If I get a song - a good song - I just sing it the way I hear it in my head. If anybody else wanted to add whistles and bells and chains rattling, that's fine. Just not too much. I actually just do things as straight ahead as possible.

What I love about piano and vocal is it's incredibly pure, and it gets down to the essence of the song because you're not distracted by an orchestra. When it's just a piano and a voice, it's about the purity of singing the song.

Get to the point where the songs sum it all up, and creatively, I'm just like, 'This is it.' I've also learned how to be patient and not really try to overproduce anymore. I used to add instruments, keep adding instruments, but nowadays - I know better now. I know how to let the track breathe.

I like to keep things deceptively simple, but hard-hitting. You can reduce everything to the perfect, essential harmony. It's what used to be done with earlier music like Gregorian chants.

Do not try to paint the grandiose thing. Paint the commonplace so that it will be distinguished.

A lifetime’s work, to try and say one thing that’s true.

I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

I'm a minimalist at heart. If a song doesn't need a solo, I'm not going to force one into it.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

I don't try to be anything. I just want to play my game.

There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.

It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful.

I shaved a lot off of a lot that I saw in that I like to be less is more and make everything count and not give anyone anything extra. I was what you see is what you got. It was organic. I came up with the persona. The persona is me, coupled together with a lot of my interests.

I don't try to do anything. I think the moment that I'm like, "Oh, I have to be this way or that way" is the moment that I become sad, or maybe an asshole. So I just try to be myself and put out what is most natural. But I think I am - I mean, I've seen a lot, been through a lot. But something remains sort of naïve within me. And I just try to nurture that.