You’ve got to find a way of saying it without saying it.
DUKE ELLINGTONI like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.
More Duke Ellington Quotes
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Gray skies are just clouds passing over.
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Every man prays in his own language.
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There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is to pay them money!
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Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.
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I don’t need time, I need a deadline.
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Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.
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By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.
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Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.
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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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Everyone prays in their own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.
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Sing sweet, but put a little dirt in it.
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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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Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
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The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.
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Tomorrow is in the wings waiting for you to sound her entrance fanfare.
DUKE ELLINGTON