Top 35 Sonny Rollins Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I hate music. I wasted my life.”

— Sonny Rollins

2. “Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one’s own.”

— Sonny Rollins

3. “No one is original. Everyone is derivative.”

— Sonny Rollins

4. “Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.”

— Sonny Rollins

5. “Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.”

— Sonny Rollins

6. “It’s all about creation and surprise. It just needs to be appreciated and watered like flowers. You have to water flowers. These peaks will come again.”

— Sonny Rollins

7. “We have to make ourselves as perfect as we can.”

— Sonny Rollins

8. “Charlie Parker stuck out in my mind.”

— Sonny Rollins

9. “I’m not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I’m just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that’s when it’s really happening.”

— Sonny Rollins

10. “I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.”

— Sonny Rollins

11. “I enjoy playing clubs. I still enjoy the closeness of the nightclub venue. However, after a certain period of time and after playing around some of the clubs in New YorkI felt that jazz should be presented in a more prestigious atmosphere.”

— Sonny Rollins

12. “Even the most jingoistic person would have to admit that even American cultural music comes from Europe. That’s what classical music is, real European music.”

— Sonny Rollins

13. “There have been many great musicians that, Clifford Brown is one great example, I mean he died very early, 25.”

— Sonny Rollins

14. “I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.”

— Sonny Rollins

15. “But if I didn’t have to make money, I would still play my horn.”

— Sonny Rollins

16. “I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That’s what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.”

— Sonny Rollins

17. “My mother came from St. Thomas. I heard that melody and all I did was actually adapt it. I made my adaptation of sort of an island traditional melody. It did become sort of my trademark tune.”

— Sonny Rollins

18. “One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music. That was his reason for being alive. Nothing else mattered except music, really.”

— Sonny Rollins

19. “What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years.”

— Sonny Rollins

20. “I’ve played with all of the heavyweights in the modern jazz, progressive jazz movement. I’ve been fortunate enough to play with them, a who’s who. All of those guys, I’ve been fortunate enough to have performed with.”

— Sonny Rollins

21. “I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.”

— Sonny Rollins

22. “I’ll know when I find the ultimate sound.”

— Sonny Rollins

23. “I’m fortunate that I’m making a living at it now because I’m not equipped to do anything else.”

— Sonny Rollins

24. “I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.”

— Sonny Rollins

25. “I am interested in my music lasting only while I’m alive. I’m not writing for the future.”

— Sonny Rollins

26. “I think music should be judged on what it is. It should be very high and above everything else. It is a beautiful way of bringing people together, a little bit of an oasis in this messed-up world.”

— Sonny Rollins

27. “Jazz has an audience all around the globe and has had for many decades, I think speaking of the United States, let’s say that what we need is more of an official recognition.”

— Sonny Rollins

28. “There was a period which I refer to as the ‘Golden Age of Jazz,’ which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time.”

— Sonny Rollins

29. “I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.”

— Sonny Rollins

30. “I miss playing with Miles. I did play with him a little while before he left the planet, but even at that time I longed to maybe do some things together.”

— Sonny Rollins

31. “I think the problem starts with the general appreciation of the music in the larger society.”

— Sonny Rollins

32. “I think what we need is a more welcoming mode from the people who put on a hundred million country-western shows on television. How about a monthly jazz show?”

— Sonny Rollins

33. “You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.”

— Sonny Rollins

34. “Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.”

— Sonny Rollins

35. “I am a person who thinks about the music first in trying to achieve something musically valid.”

— Sonny Rollins