Thelonious Monk
All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.
I don't know what other people are doing - I just know about me.
Everybody in all countries tries to play jazz.
I guess, you know, if I didn't make it with the piano, I guess I would've been the biggest bum.
We have two kids, my wife and myself.
I never though much about race.
I can shoot pool, and I can play ping-pong. I'm pretty good at those games.
I'd go stupid collecting and counting my money.
Be-bop wasn't developed in any deliberate way.
There are no wrong notes; some are just more right than others.Collection: Notes
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.Collection: Music
The loudest noise in the world is silence.Collection: Silence
Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazyCollection: Crazy
Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.Collection: Thinking
Trying to explain music is like trying to dance architecture.Collection: Music
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.Collection: Music
The only cats worth anything are the cats that take chances.Collection: Humor
Everyone is a genius at being themselvesCollection: Genius
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.Collection: Hate
A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Play
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!Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Running
Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.Collection: Mean
Everyone is influenced by everybody but you bring it down home the way you feel it.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Inspiration
I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.Collection: Music
After two takes you're imitating yourself.Collection: Music
It's always night, or we wouldn't need light.Collection: Night
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.Collection: Music
A genius is the one most like himself.Collection: Genius
I played the wrong wrong notes.Collection: Notes
The piano ain't got no wrong notes.Collection: Piano
If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.Collection: Music
I made the wrong mistakesCollection: Mistake
Anybody talented in any way - they're called eccentric.Collection: Eccentric
I didn't know there were 2 ten o'clocks in a day.Collection: Jazz
Those who want to know what sound goes into my music should come to NY and open their ears.Collection: Sound
The majority of juice-heads and winos and junkies arent musicians.Collection: Musician
I don't know where jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.Collection: Music
I always believed in being myself.Collection: Being Myself
The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound good.Collection: Bridges
I have to listen to New York; I live there. I wasn't born there, but I've been living there all my life.Collection: New York
Jazz is my adventure.Collection: Adventure
I find my inspiration in myself.Collection: Music
Miles'd got killed if he hit me.Collection: Jazz
I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition.Collection: Party
I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.Collection: Music
All musicians are potential band leaders.Collection: Leader
Man, that cat [Ornette Coleman] is nuts.Collection: Music