Miles: The Autobiography

It’s like, how did Columbus discover America when the Indians were already here? What kind of shit is that, but white people’s shit?

Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery.

A lot of people ask me where music is going today. I think it's going in short phrases. If you listen, anybody with an ear can hear that. Music is always changing. It changes because of the times and the technology that's available, the material that things are made of, like plastic cars instead of steel. So when you hear an accident today it sounds different, not all the metal colliding like it was in the forties and fifties. Musicians pick up sounds and incorporate that into their playing, so the music that they make will be different.

But you've got to have style in whatever you do -- writing, music, painting, fashion, boxing, anything.

Philly Joe was a bitch. If he'd been a lawyer and white, he would have been president of the United States, because in order to get there you gotta talk fast and carry a lot of bullshit with you; Philly had it all and a lot to spare.

The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit... I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it... I saw that flame and felt that hotness of it close to my face. I felt fear, real fear, for the first time in my life. But I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I guess that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn't been before... The fear I had was almost like an invitation, a challenge to go forward into something I knew nothing about. That's where I think my personal philosophy of life and my commitment to everything I believe in started... In my mind I have always believed and thought since then that my motion had to be forward, away from the heat of that flame.

Being rebellious and black, a nonconformist, being cool and hip and angry and sophisticated and ultra clean, whatever else you want to call it -- I was all those things and more. But I was playing the fuck out of my horn and had a great group, so I didn't get recognition based only on a rebel image.

When I got into music I went all the way into music; I didn't have no time after that for nothing else.

Bad music is what will ruin music, not the instruments musicians choose to play.

Music is a funny thing when you really come to think about it.

I'm a fiend when it comes to good pastry, and the French make the best as far as I'm concerned.

Naw, I wasn't going to sell my principles for them. I wanted to be accepted as a good musician and that didn't call for no grinning, but just being able to play the horn good. And that's what I did then and now. Critics can take that or leave it.

I hate how white people always try to take credit for something after they discover it. Like it wasn't happening before they found out about it -- which most times is always late, and they didn't have nothing to do with it happening. Then, they try to take all the credit, try to cut everybody black out.

I know people get tired of hearing it but black people have got to keep saying it, throwing our conditions up into these people's faces until something is done about the way they have treated us. We've just got to keep it in front of their eyes and their ears like the Jews have done. We've got to make them know and understand just how evil the things are that they did to us over all these years and are still doing to us today.

No, no pensaré en Gil como alguien que murió, ni tampoco pienso así en Jimmy, porque mi mente no va por esos caminos. Le echaré de menos, pero Gil sigue estando vivo en mi recuerdo, como lo está Jimmy, como lo están Trane y Bud y Monk y Bird y Mingus y Red y Paul y Wynton y todo el resto de hijoputas geniales, como Philly Joe, que ya han desaparecido de este mundo. Todos

El conocimiento, el saber, es libertad, mientras que la ignorancia es esclavitud, y yo, simplemente, no podía creer que alguien estuviera tan cerca de la libertad y no se aprovechase de su buena suerte. Es