Quotes By Quincy Jones

I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.

I don't remember feeling love.

The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.

When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.

I'm never in my life going to do a record that's a tribute to myself. I don't need it.

Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.

When I was 14, I was a passenger in a terrible accident.

I'm not a psychiatrist.

Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing.

Everybody has their idiosyncrasies.

I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.

We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.

A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer - you put a great song on top of that, you're really in great shape!

After every war, there was a significant change in the music, and I can understand how that happened. If you participate in protecting the country, you think you can be part of it, but you come back home and it's worse than ever.

My son is a hip-hop producer.

I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.

It slaps your dignity just right. I loved the idea of these proud, dignified black men, and I saw the older ones wounded, and it wounded me ten times as much because I couldn't stand seeing them hurt like this.

I was married for 36 years but now I'm free.