Simplicity is a most complex form.
DUKE ELLINGTONSing sweet, but put a little dirt in it.
More Duke Ellington Quotes
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Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.
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I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
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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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Everybody in Canada seemed to listen to what they enjoyed, and nobody could tell them what to like, or what was the popular, or what was the In thing. Even today, it is very hard to brainwash a Canadian.
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I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King’s son.
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Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.
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Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
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If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.
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Everyone prays in their own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.
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There are two kinds of worries – those you can do something about and those you can’t. Don’t spend any time on the latter.
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Be a number one yourself. And not a number two somebody else.
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Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.
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There is no art when one does something without intention.
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I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
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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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Love is supreme and unconditional; like is nice but limited.
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Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat. I think that people who don’t dance, or who never did dance, don’t really understand the beat. I know musicians who don’t and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating.
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A Satin Doll is a woman who is as pretty on the inside as she is on the outside.
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I don’t need time, I need a deadline.
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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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The Europeans who went to Africa came back with “modern’ art. What is more African than a Picasso?
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It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line
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Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn’t do nothing.
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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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Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.
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Every man prays in his own language.
DUKE ELLINGTON