I tell my kids and I tell proteges, always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed, because it's not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever.
Interpretation
Stay humble in your creativity and graceful in your success, recognizing that your talents are given to you for a greater purpose.
Quincy Jones emphasizes the importance of humility and grace in the journey of creativity and success. He suggests that recognizing oneself as a conduit for a higher power fosters a mindset that allows one to sustain their achievements and contributions for the long term, reminding us that individual success is tied to something greater than ourselves.
In practice
During a motivational speech, one could quote Quincy Jones to inspire young artists to remain humble.
Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?
Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.
When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.
You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
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.
I think the attraction of 'American Idol' is about the basic human nature attitude that is, 'We can put you up there. But we can take you down.'
Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.
An overdose of praise is like 10 lumps of sugar in coffee; only a very few people can swallow it.
The distance runner is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.
Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
If you don't pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.
I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.
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