"Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent."
"I don't hold it against Dizzy [Gillespie], you know, but if a guy wants to play a certain way, you work towards that. If he stops - he's full of crap, you know. I mean, I wouldn't do it, for no money, or for no place in the white man's world. Not just to make money, because then you don't have anything. You don't have as much money as whoever you're trying to ape; that's making money by being commercial. Then you don't have anything to give the world; so you're not important. You might as well be dead."
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Source: Miles Davis, Quincy Troupe (1990). “Miles”, p.251, Simon and Schuster
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