Duke Ellington Quotes

A problem is a chance for you to do your best.

— Duke Ellington

“I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.”

— Duke Ellington

Music is the tonal reflection of beauty.

— Duke Ellington

“If it sounds good, it IS good.”

— Duke Ellington

“New York is a place where the rich walk, the poor drive Cadillac's, and the beggars die of malnutrition with thousands of dollars hidden in their mattresses.”

— Duke Ellington

“You can't write music right unless you know how the man that'll play it plays poker.”

— Duke Ellington

“Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young.”

— Duke Ellington

“Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.”

— Duke Ellington

“Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.”

— Duke Ellington

“People do not retire. They are retired by others.”

— Duke Ellington

“There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.”

— Duke Ellington

“On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.”

— Duke Ellington

“How can anyone expect to be understood unless he presents his thoughts with complete honesty? This situation is unfair because it asks too much of the world. In effect, we say, ' I don't dare show you what I am because I don't trust you for a minute but please love me anyway because I so need you to. And, of course, if you don't love me anyway, you're a dirty dog, just as I suspected, so I was right in the first place.' Yet, every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened.”

— Duke Ellington

“Everyone prays in their own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.”

— Duke Ellington

“There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.”

— Duke Ellington

“Everybody in Canada seemed to listen to what they enjoyed, and nobody could tell them what to like, or what was the popular, or what was the In thing. Even today, it is very hard to brainwash a Canadian.”

— Duke Ellington

“My mother told me I was blessed, and I have always taken her word for it. Being born of - or reincarnated from - royalty is nothing Like being blessed. Royalty is inherited from another
human being; blessedness comes from God.”

— Duke Ellington

The common root, of course, comes out of Africa. That's the pulse.The African pulse. It's all the way back from ... the old slave chants and up through the blues, the jazz, and up through rock. And it's all got the African pulse.

— Duke Ellington

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line

— Duke Ellington

“You've got to find a way of saying it without saying it.”

— Duke Ellington

“Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat. I think that people who don't dance, or who never did dance, don't really understand the beat ... I know musicians who don't and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating.”

— Duke Ellington

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

— Duke Ellington

“There is no art without intention.”

— Duke Ellington

In music, as you develop a theme or musical idea, there are many points at which directions must be decided, and at any time I was in the throes of debate with myself, harmonically or melodically, I would turn to Billy Strayhorn. We would talk, and then the whole world would come into focus. The steady hand of his good judgment pointed to the clear way that was fitting for us. He was not, as he was often referred to by many, my alter ego. Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.

— Duke Ellington

“Simplicity is a most complex form”

— Duke Ellington

The artist must say it without saying it.

— Duke Ellington

“Be a number one yourself. And not a number two somebody else.”

— Duke Ellington

Self-discipline, as a virtue or an acquired asset, can be invaluable to anyone.

— Duke Ellington

“What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?”

— Duke Ellington

“The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now.”

— Duke Ellington

“Roaming through the jungle of "Ohs" and "Ahs" searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.”

— Duke Ellington

I like any and all of my associations with music -writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

— Duke Ellington

San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus of the world - one of the really urbane communities in the United States - one of the truly cosmopolitan places and for many, many years, it always has had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world

— Duke Ellington

“Every man prays in his own language.”

— Duke Ellington

“Sing sweet, but put a little dirt in it.”

— Duke Ellington

“Hurry, get on board, it's comin', listen to those rails a-thrumming all aboard. Get on the "A" train, soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem.”

— Duke Ellington

“I began by tinkering around with some old tunes I knew. Then, just to try something different, I set to putting some music to the rhythm that I used in jerking ice-cream sodas at the Poodle Dog. I fooled around with the tune more and more until at last, lo and behold, I had completed my first piece of finished music.”

— Duke Ellington

“My biggest kick in music -playing or writing- is when I have a problem. Without a problem to solve, how much interest do you take in anything?”

— Duke Ellington

“I don't need time. What I need is a deadline!”

— Duke Ellington

“Somehow I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself.”

— Duke Ellington

“If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.”

— Duke Ellington

“Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.”

— Duke Ellington

“Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.”

— Duke Ellington

“The problem of expressing the contributions that Benny Carter has made to popular music is so tremendous it completely fazes me, so extraordinary a musician is he.”

— Duke Ellington

Problems are chances for us to do our best.

— Duke Ellington

“Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn't do nothing.”

— Duke Ellington

Tomorrow is in the wings waiting for you to sound her entrance fanfare.

— Duke Ellington

“I fluffed off the guy who kept requesting tunes all night, then found out he was the King's son.”

— Duke Ellington

New music? Hell, there's been no new music since Stravinsky.

— Duke Ellington

“Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.”

— Duke Ellington