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Quincy Jones has been around a looonnnngggg time, and he's still going strong. Today's interview of him in the NY Times bears witness to his eloquence:

Q) You once wrote that Michael Jackson stopped working with you because he felt threatened by the credit you were getting for his music. Considering he was never able to repeat the success he had with "Off the Wall," "Thriller" and "Bad," how much credit do you deserve?

A) Well, what do you think?

Q) I don't know. I wasn't in the studio.

A) You heard the albums, didn't you? That's nothing to do with any one person. That's the combination of the two of us. You're looking at one of the most talented kids in the history of show business. Michael was very observant and detail-oriented. You put that together with my background of big-band arranging and composing, we had no limitations.

Q) Did he really never personally tell you he was moving on?

A) He didn't, no. It’s O.K., man. It's not like I'm gonna roll over and die. He told his manager that I was losing it, that I didn't understand the business because I didn't understand in 1987 that rap was dead. Rap wasn't dead. Rap hadn't even started yet.

Of course, like every great performer, Quincy saves the best for last:

Q) Your daughter Kidada was engaged to Tupac Shakur when he was killed. How does a father react to a potential son-in-law with such a dangerous reputation?

A) I wasn't happy at first. He'd attacked me for having all these white wives. And my daughter Rashida, who was at Harvard, wrote a letter to The Source taking him apart. I remember one night I was dropping Rashida at Jerry's delicatessen, and Tupac was talking to Kidada because he was falling in love with her then. Like an idiot, I went over to him, put two arms on his shoulders and said, "Pac, we gotta sit down and talk, man." If he had had a gun, I would've been done. But we talked. He apologized. We became very close after that. Once, I was having a date at the Hotel Bel-Air, and he came by and told the waiter that he would be back, he was going home to put on a tie.

Q) A tie? You're destroying his thug legacy.

A) Ask my daughter! She was there!

Q) Do you know about that conspiracy theory that says you ordered the hit on Tupac?

A) I know. The people who say I wanted to have sex with him. Man, this is the biggest age of haters I have ever seen in my life. I’ve been called a blonde-lover, a pedophile, gay, everything. I don't care, man. Imagine my daughter being engaged to Tupac and me trying to make love to him? And I'm not into no men, man. I'm a hard-core lesbian. Are you kidding? All my life, all my life.

Go Quincy! Go Quincy! Do you feel him? ...too funny...

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