218 Quotes by Miles Davis

Joao Gilberto on guitar could read a newspaper and sound good.

There are no wrong notes.

I don't care if a dude is purple with green breath as long as he can swing.

Sometimes [playing free] doesn't happen, because maybe a guy's wife'll come in, you know, and his ego will catch him. If everybody's completely just straight-without any old ladies over here, a fourth of whisky over there; if it's balanced right, it'll come off. It has to be. But when you get egos involved with playing free, you can't do it.

Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player.

When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

I've come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I've never got there. . . . I'm always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play everyday.

You can tell whether a person plays well or not by the way he carries the instrument, whether it means something to him or not.

You can't eat a winner's plaque.