"I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast."
"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."
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More quotes by Paul Desmond
"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."
"Complexity can be a trap. You can have a ball developing a phrase, inverting it, playing it in different keys and times and all. But it's really more introspective than communicative. Like a crossword puzzle compared to a poem."
"I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini."