Top 40 Ornette Coleman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Music has many uses and I think the most perfected use that music has is one of a healing quality.”

— Ornette Coleman

2. “It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.”

— Ornette Coleman

3. “I wasn’t so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That’s why I’m broke.”

— Ornette Coleman

4. “I don’t try to please when I play. I try to cure.”

— Ornette Coleman

5. “We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.”

— Ornette Coleman

6. “Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.”

— Ornette Coleman

7. “Making music is like a form of religion for me, because it soothes your heart and increases the pleasure of your brain. Most of all, it’s very enjoyable to express something that you can only hear and not see, which is not bad.”

— Ornette Coleman

8. “You don’t have to worry about being a number one, number two, or number three. Numbers don’t have anything to do with placement. Numbers only have something to do with repetition.”

— Ornette Coleman

9. “If you decide you want to be treated good, and you treat someone else good, or you want to learn something, it’s information. It’s getting the right, good information.”

— Ornette Coleman

10. “Jerry Garcia was one of the original American icons. He played naturally and beautifully.”

— Ornette Coleman

11. “No one has to learn to spell to talk, right? You see a little kid holding a conversation with an adult. He probably doesn’t know the words he’s saying, but he knows where to fit them to make what he’s thinking logical to what you’re saying.”

— Ornette Coleman

12. “Sound has no parents.”

— Ornette Coleman

13. “That’s why I haven’t been so anxious. But now, lots of people write and say, ‘I want to find out what you’re doing.’ So I know that this book will enlighten them.”

— Ornette Coleman

14. “Harmelody allows everybody to be an individual who does not have to imitate anybody else.”

— Ornette Coleman

15. “I’m having this conversation with you now. I’m talking, but I’m thinking, feeling, smelling, and moving. Yet I’m concentrating on what you’re saying. So that means there’s more things going on in the body than just the present thing that the person’s got you doing.”

— Ornette Coleman

16. “I don’t really live like a musician myself. I think music is just something that I do, but I’d like to be doing lots of other things. I like to cure all kinds of illness.”

— Ornette Coleman

17. “I remember once I read a book on mental illness and there was a nurse that had gotten sick. Do you know what she died from? From worrying about the mental patients not being able to get their food. She became a mental patient.”

— Ornette Coleman

18. “All the things that human beings suffer from are how their environment treats them, and how the elements of their planet affects their mind and body – like radiation, cancer, and all.”

— Ornette Coleman

19. “Only America makes you feel that everybody wants to be like you. That’s what success is: Everybody wants to be like you.”

— Ornette Coleman

20. “For me, being an innovator doesn’t mean being more intelligent, more rich, it’s not a word, it’s an action.”

— Ornette Coleman

21. “I don’t know what they’re thinking about. Just because someone says, ‘I like what you do’ or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I’ve had that experience with record companies.”

— Ornette Coleman

22. “I decided, if I’m going to be poor and black and all, the least thing I’m going to do is to try and find out who I am. I created everything about me.”

— Ornette Coleman

23. “When I have them working together, it’s like a beautiful kaleidoscope.”

— Ornette Coleman

24. “The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.”

— Ornette Coleman

25. “That’s what I was trying to say when we were talking about sound. I think that every person, whether they play music or don’t play music, has a sound – their own sound, that thing that you’re talking about.”

— Ornette Coleman

26. “To me, human existence exists on a multiple level, not just on a two-dimensional level, not just having to be identified with what you do and what you say.”

— Ornette Coleman

27. “Musicians tell me, if what I’m doing is right, they should never have gone to school.”

— Ornette Coleman

28. “The idea is more important than the style you’re playing in.”

— Ornette Coleman

29. “It’s just someone has labelled us as having a different label to do what you do. I find that labels are the worst thing in the world for artistic expression.”

— Ornette Coleman

30. “I think that those elements – light and sound – are beyond democratic. They’re into the creative part of life.”

— Ornette Coleman

31. “You’ve got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it’s all played by the same notes.”

— Ornette Coleman

32. “It seems the activity of expressing sound to do with music has just started blooming – and because of that, the beginners feel like they’re professionals, and the professionals feel like they are beginners, which is very healthy.”

— Ornette Coleman

33. “Whatever you do, it’s over when you do it – but first you have to do it.”

— Ornette Coleman

34. “It seems to me that in the western world, culture has something to do with appearance. A person that’s out creating good stuff has got to appreciate someone when they take the time to have an appearance that goes with what they’re doing.”

— Ornette Coleman

35. “I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you’re going to do it but when you do it.”

— Ornette Coleman

36. “Most of my relationships have been like that – with record companies. I’ve never had a legitimate business relationship with a company. I’ve always had a personal relationship with someone in the company.”

— Ornette Coleman

37. “I’ve never had a relationship with a record executive. I always went to the record company by someone that liked my playing. Then they would get fired, and I’d be left with the record company. And then – because they got fired – the record company wouldn’t do anything for me.”

— Ornette Coleman

38. “Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.”

— Ornette Coleman

39. “I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.”

— Ornette Coleman

40. “After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player.”

— Ornette Coleman

41. “I’m interested in music, not in my image. If someone plays something fantastic, that I could never have thought of, it makes me happy to know it exists.”

— Ornette Coleman

42. “I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn’t come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn’t know what the composer was trying to do.”

— Ornette Coleman