Paul Desmond Quotes

I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.

Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

The qualities in music which I considered most important - and still do - were beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination, and sincerity.

Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.

I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.

Not for me. If I want to tune everybody out, I just take off my glasses and enjoy the haze.

I would like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.

It was never supposed to be a hit. It was supposed to be a Joe Morello drum solo.

I discovered early in life that if you take gym first period, you can go into the wrestling room and sit in the corner and sleep.

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

Our basic audience begins with creaking elderly types of twenty-three and above.

We're working as if it were going out of style-which of course it is.

We used to get on planes, and they'd ask who we were, and we'd say, 'The Dave Brubeck Quartet', and they'd say, 'Who?' In later years they'd say, 'Oh', which amounts to the same thing.