Creativity Quote by Quincy Jones

Quincy Jones drops this like a casual memory, but the phrasing does quiet heavy lifting. “We spent most of our life” is an exaggeration that tells you how childhood can feel when you grow up fast: those first ten years don’t just precede the story, they set the rules for everything that follows. Then he lands on “almost like street rats,” a metaphor that’s deliberately ugly. It’s not cute “kids being kids.” It’s survival-coded: feral, watchful, improvising, learning the city’s rhythms the way a musician learns time.

The line also carries a kind of self-protection. “Almost like” gives him a half-step of distance from the humiliation of poverty while still letting the image hit. Jones isn’t asking for pity; he’s marking a provenance. If you want to understand how someone becomes a producer with uncanny social and sonic intelligence, you start with a childhood where your education is movement, risk assessment, and reading people instantly.

Context matters: Jones came up in an era where Black urban life was routinely framed by outsiders as pathology. He reclaims that terrain without polishing it. The street becomes both threat and training ground. That’s the subtext: the same conditions that could have swallowed him also sharpened his instincts, his hustle, his ear for what’s coming next. The quote compresses a whole cultural biography into one image of unsupervised freedom that’s never really free.