Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Louis Armstrong - Page 2

You can't take it for granted. Even if we have two, three days off I still have to blow that horn a few hours to keep up the chops. I mean I've been playing 50 years, and that's what I've been doing in order to keep in that groove there.

I'm a spade, you're an ofay. Let's play.

You see, pops, that's the kind of talk that's ruining the music. Everyone's trying to do something new, no one trying to learn the fundamentals first. All them young cats playing their wierd chords. And what happens? No one's working.

[Bebop is] Chinese music.

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans. When that's where you left your heart. The moonlight on the bayou a creole tune that fills the air. I dream about magnolias in bloom and I'm wishin' I was there.

Love is talkative passion.

I'll bet right now most of the youngsters and hot club fans who hear the name Storyville hasn't the least idea that it consisted of some of the biggest prostitutes in the world ... Standing in their doorways nightly in their fine and beautiful negligees -- faintly calling to the boys as they passed their cribs.

I've Got the World on a String.

As many bands as you heard [in New Orleans], that's how many bands you heard playing right. I thought I was in Heaven playing second trumpet in the Tuxedo Brass Band -- and they had some funeral marches that would just touch your heart, they were so beautiful.

Red beans and ricely yours.

The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell!

Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of like half-fast.

At first it was just a misdemeanor, but then you lost the "mis-de" and you just got meaner and meaner.

All them weird chords which don't mean a thing...you got no melody to remember, and no beat to dance to

There's only two ways to sum up music; either it's good or it's bad. If it's good you don't mess about it, you just enjoy it.

When I go to the Gate, I'll play a duet with Gabriel. Yeah, we'll play 'Sleepy Time Down South' and 'Hello, Dolly!.' Then he can blow a couple that he's been playing up there all the time.

Jazz is what I play for a living.

I spent nine days in the Downtown Los Angeles City Jail. The judge gave me a suspended sentence and I went to work that night - wailed just like nothing happened. What strucked me funny though - I laughed real loud when several movie stars came up to the bandstand while we played a dance set and told me, when they heard about me getting caught with marijuana, they thought marijuana was a chick. Woo boy - that really fractured me!

As a youngster in the little orphanage home in New Orleans, I was the bugler of the institution. When I got to be around 13 or 14 years old, they took me off the bugle and put me in the little brass band.

Music is either good or bad, and it's got to be learned. You got to have balance.

It ain't whatcha say, it's the way howcha say it.

When you're dead, you're done.

Never play a thing the same way twice.

It's America's classical music ... this becomes our tradition ... the bottom line of any country in the world is what did we contribute to the world? ... we contributed Louis Armstrong

You either have it or you don't. You play your horn just like you sing a song or a hymn. If it's in your heart, you express yourself in the tune.

It's getting almost so bad a colored man hasn't got any country.

White folks still in the lead.

When I was young and very green, I worte that tune, Sister Kate, and someone said that's fine, let me publish it for you. I'll give you fifty dollars. I didn't know nothing about papers, and business, and I sold it outright.

When you're with another tea smoker it makes you feel a special kinship.

We don't play slow and we don't play fast, we play half fast

If you still have to ask, shame on you

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

Unless you know what it is I ain't never going to be able to explain it to you.

There's a thing I've dreamed of all my life, and I'll be damned if it don't look like it's about to come true-to be King of the Zulu's parade. After that, I'll be ready to die.

A lot of the musicians asked me if when I hit my high-Cs on the records I had a clarinet take the notes. Some [thought] I had invented some kind of gadget so I could play high register. They weren't satisfied until they handed me a trumpet that they had with them and had me swing it. Then they cheered.

I had a chance to play with the best musicians that were coming through because I was pretty good myself or else they wouldn't have tolerated with me.