Thelonious Monk Quotes

As a composer, I'm basically trying to represent myself through my music in an honest way.

You can play as good as you want, but you have to sing from a place of living.

Jesus, music has always been my first love. I use music in my work because it's the fastest way to an emotional place. You hear a song, and that memory comes right back-- you're there... Making music is immediate, and it's all about you. If you're playing guitar, the feeling comes through-- the way you bend the note, the intensity with which you hit the strings. With making films, although it's real emotion, it's false emotion. You're lying.

The point is to let the music be itself. If it doesn't mean anything to you, then it's bullsh*t.

I don't hold it against Dizzy [Gillespie], you know, but if a guy wants to play a certain way, you work towards that. If he stops - he's full of crap, you know. I mean, I wouldn't do it, for no money, or for no place in the white man's world. Not just to make money, because then you don't have anything. You don't have as much money as whoever you're trying to ape; that's making money by being commercial. Then you don't have anything to give the world; so you're not important. You might as well be dead.

Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community. I mean, I wanted people to love the book. And the only way to get them to love it is to try to make it good for them. So of course the audience has to be considered.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

I no longer wanted to satisfy myself. I really want to connect with the world and make my music mean something to people.

Music is the noise that surrounds the stillness of the art form.

Maybe if my songs feel personal, that's very nice. I like that. I take that as a great compliment.

I've always thought that comedy was just another dramatic expression. I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama. There's a lot of bullshit drama that leaves you totally cold. And there's a lot of wasted comedy time too. But when you get something honest, it doesn't matter what label you give it.

In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am.

My art is just an effort to express the truth of my being in gesture and movement. It has taken me long years to find even one absolutely true movement.

You can't get so interested in just making sounds. The point of it all is some kind of expression.

The qualities in music which I considered most important - and still do - were beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination, and sincerity.

If you can't do it with feeling - don't.

I think "artistic" simply means there's more of the creator in the thing. Whether it's painting or song or movie or game, the creator puts more of themselves into the piece, so when the audience see it, they feel something real, they feel something human, they feel something that's like a person.

I just sing the song and I sing it with conviction, meaning and I get into the mood of every song I do no matter how much time I have in between.

The music is mine. Theres nothing to hide behind. Thats where you see the real person.

My driving philosophy about making music is that you can reduce it all down to one note if that note is played with the right kind of sincerity.

The way I look at music, what I'm interested in is not necessarily creativity - in many ways I think creativity is overrated, actually. What I think is important is authenticity. I want to hear music that has the resonance of the people. I want to hear music that is an amplification of them. Because then, I can experience the people. But because the music has become so institutionalized, everyone is learning and regurgitating the same material in the same way.

To play piano is a significant part of my life, my existence. It fulfills a very physical & spiritual need for me.

Poetry, I have discovered, is always unexpected and always as faithful and honest as dreams.

All truths, not merely ideas, but truthful faces, truthful pictures or songs, are highly beautiful.

Jazz to me is the spirit of freedom. I mean real freedom. Freedom to explore. Freedom to express. Freedom to pour out your guts.