Top 70 Quincy Jones Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Not one ounce of my self worth depends on your acceptance of me.”

— Quincy Jones

2. “Every day, my daddy told me the same thing. ‘Once a task is just begun, never leave it till it’s done. Be the labour great or small, do it well or not at all.’”

— Quincy Jones

3. “I learned real early why God gave us two ears and one mouth, because you’re supposed to listen twice as much as you talk.”

— Quincy Jones

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4. “The process is the most beautiful part.”

— Quincy Jones

5. “Excellence isn’t an act, it’s a habit.”

— Quincy Jones

6. “Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.”

— Quincy Jones

7. “Greatness occurs when your children love you, when your critics respect you and when you have peace of mind.”

— Quincy Jones

8. “You Make Your Mistakes To Learn How To Get To The Good Stuff.”

— Quincy Jones

9. “If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.”

— Quincy Jones

10. “Let’s not get too full of ourselves. Let’s leave space for God to come into the room.”

— Quincy Jones

11. “Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing.”

— Quincy Jones

12. “I’ve always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, “Ain’t that the truth.””

— Quincy Jones

13. “It’s the attitude about life, man. Looking at the light instead of the dark. Looking at love instead of fear.”

— Quincy Jones

14. “When you’re over the hill, that’s when you pick up speed.”

— Quincy Jones

15. “Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That’s the soul of a country.”

— Quincy Jones

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16. “I was reading Omar Khayyam, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, L. Ron Hubbard, all sorts of philosophy. Bebop cats are like that. Curious. I wanted to know about everything.”

— Quincy Jones

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17. “I tell my kids and I tell proteges, always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed, because its not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever.”

— Quincy Jones

18. “The act of multitrack recording is the act of arranging.”

— Quincy Jones

19. “Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.”

— Quincy Jones

20. “The climate in the ’50s and ’60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.”

— Quincy Jones

21. “You cannot get an A if you’re afraid of getting an F.”

— Quincy Jones

22. “You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.”

— Quincy Jones

23. “Making a record is like painting a school bus with a toothbrush.”

— Quincy Jones

24. “Young people should travel, and they don’t. You can’t know if you don’t go.”

— Quincy Jones

25. “Playing the game, and unfortunately, playing the gangster game is very profitable.”

— Quincy Jones

26. “A person’s age can be determined by the degree of pain he experiences when he comes in contact with a new idea.”

— Quincy Jones

27. “A lot of the guys were like that – Oscar Pettiford – they just took me under their wing, and that’s why I automatically help young people. I just love it, because they did that for me.”

— Quincy Jones

28. “I found this out over the years, that racism is a thinly veiled disguise over economics and money. It really is.”

— Quincy Jones

29. “Well, listen, anger doesn’t get anything done, so you have to find out: How do you make it work? That’s why I was always maniacal about transforming every problem into a puzzle which I can solve. I can solve a puzzle – a problem just stresses me out.”

— Quincy Jones

30. “Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.”

— Quincy Jones

31. “Billy Strayhorn wrote Multicolored Blue. Billy to me is the boss of the arrangers.”

— Quincy Jones

32. “I’m a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.”

— Quincy Jones

33. “I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.”

— Quincy Jones

34. “A song should have all the color and beauty of every rose.”

— Quincy Jones

35. “My son is a hip-hop producer.”

— Quincy Jones

36. “A bad song, the three best singers in the world cannot save it, and that’s the bottom line.”

— Quincy Jones

37. “I was the most subtle person in the world.”

— Quincy Jones

38. “I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.”

— Quincy Jones

39. “I don’t deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn’t deserve that, either. So I’ll keep it.”

— Quincy Jones

40. “I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.”

— Quincy Jones

41. “My grandmother had this high-tech security system – a rusty nail she used to lock the door.”

— Quincy Jones

42. “Some summers my father would take us down to visit our grandmother in Louisville, who was an ex-slave, Susan Jones, and she had a shotgun shack they call it, and no electricity, a well in the back, a coal stove, kerosene lamps.”

— Quincy Jones

43. “A great song can make a terrible singer sound good, but a good singer – you put a great song on top of that, you’re really in great shape!”

— Quincy Jones

44. “You have to know that your real home is within.”

— Quincy Jones

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45. “We were in the heart of the ghetto in Chicago during the Depression, and every block – it was probably the biggest black ghetto in America – every block also is the spawning ground practically for every gangster, black and white, in America too.”

— Quincy Jones

46. “The only music I don’t like is bad music.”

— Quincy Jones

47. “We stole a box of honey jars one time and went out in the woods and took care of the whole box. I don’t think I touched honey again for 20 years. I never wanted to see honey again.”

— Quincy Jones

48. “Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.”

— Quincy Jones

49. “I was married for 36 years but now I’m free.”

— Quincy Jones

50. “I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.”

— Quincy Jones