Miles Davis Quotes

If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.

When they make records with all the mistakes in, as well as the rest, then they'll really make jazz records. If the mistakes aren't there too, it ain't none of you.

Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it.

For me, music and life are all about style.

I’ll play it and tell you what it is later.

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery.

If you understood everything I said, you’d be me

I can't tell... All those white tenor players sound alike to me.

Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.

It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

The metric system ruined me.

He never wasted a melody. He never wasted a phrase. He and Duke Ellington changed the whole sound. There is no way to describe it because there's nobody on this earth that can do that anymore. What he did to the texture of an orchestration, what he did with a pop song is like writing an original piece. Students will discover him. They'll have to take his music apart layer by layer. That's how they'll know what kind of genius he was.

Being rebellious and black, a nonconformist, being cool and hip and angry and sophisticated and ultra clean, whatever else you want to call it — I was all those things and more. But I was playing the fuck out of my horn and had a great group, so I didn't get recognition based only on a rebel image.

WE WERE ALL UP IN THAT SHIT LIKE A MUTHAFUCKA. IT'S CLEANER THAN A BROKE DICK DOG.