Success Quote by Cecil Taylor

Taylor’s line is a manifesto disguised as a gentle suggestion: stop treating art as something you do after life, and start treating life as something you compose. Coming from a musician who made improvisation feel like weather - sudden, dense, unrepeatable - it’s also a rebuke to the idea that meaning is prewritten. If “the creation of music” sits alongside “the creation of your own life values,” then values aren’t inherited furniture; they’re built, revised, and sometimes smashed for better acoustics.

The phrasing matters. Taylor doesn’t say living is like music in the cute metaphorical sense. He says it becomes “a musical process,” shifting from product to practice. Process is where his whole aesthetic lives: the risk, the listening, the responding in real time. That’s the subtext aimed at anyone who wants certainty before they act. In Taylor’s world, you act, you listen, you adjust. Structure isn’t a cage; it’s a set of choices you keep making.

Context sharpens it. Taylor was a pioneering figure in avant-garde jazz, a tradition often caricatured as chaos by people who confuse unfamiliarity with lack of discipline. The quote quietly defends that music - and that life - as rigorous self-authorship. It’s an invitation to live with the same standards great improvisers live by: attention, courage, and an intolerance for autopilot. If you’re composing your values, you’re responsible for the sound you make in the world.