Charles Mingus Quotes

If you think this is weird, just look at yourselves.

I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived.

Anybody can make the simple complecated. Creativity is making the complecated simple.

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

My son’s a painter. All through school his teachers tell him he’s a genius. I tell him to paint me an apple that looks like an apple before he paints me one that doesn’t. Go where you can go, but start from someplace recognizable.

They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

Bach is how buildings got taller. It’s how we got to the moon.

Life has many changes. Tomorrow it may rain, and it’s supposed to be sunshine, ’cause it’s summertime. But God’s got a funny soul, he plays like Charlie Parker.

I’m going to keep on finding out the kind of man I am through my music. That’s the one place I can be free. But the reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

My music is evidence of my soul’s will to live.

I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

Making the complicated simple is true creativity.

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

Everything I do is Mingus.

My music is evidence of my souls will to live.

I never heard my music played the way I heard it in my head.

I’ve got a feeling that if it’s so easy for you – the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say.

If Charlie Parker were a Gunslinger, There’d be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

I was always doing revolutionary things, things that would alert people, so they would stop being so subservient.

I am Charles Mingus. Half-black man. Yellow man. Half-yellow. Not even yellow, nor white enough to pass for nothing but black and not too light enough to be called white.