Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.
DUKE ELLINGTONA problem is a chance for you to do your best.
More Duke Ellington Quotes
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Critics have their purposes, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.
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Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.
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It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
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Somehow I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself.
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I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
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The Europeans who went to Africa came back with “modern’ art. What is more African than a Picasso?
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A musical profit outweighs a financial loss.
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The problem of expressing the contributions that Benny Carter has made to popular music is so tremendous it completely fazes me, so extraordinary a musician is he.
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Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don’t want it.
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Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.
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Yet, every time God’s children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened.
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On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.
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My mother told me I was blessed, and I have always taken her word for it. Being born of – or reincarnated from – royalty is nothing Like being blessed. Royalty is inherited from another human being; blessedness comes from God.
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The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.
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There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.
DUKE ELLINGTON