Listening to Benny [Goodman] talk about the clarinet was like listening to a surgeon get hung up on a scalpel.

If you don’t see the wonder in the most ordinary phenomenon, you’re not going to resonate very much.

The good old days are neither better nor worse than the ones we're living through right now.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper... a windshield wiper that's fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing 'Melancholy Baby' and you've got dance music.

Essentially, the popular musician in America must learn that his basic job is to entertain people, to make them forget their sorrows for a moment or two; in the same sense that any popular art form must aim at the same distraction value. Any such job as that is basically a young man's business. It takes a young man's energy to go traveling around the country, night after night in a different place, prancing and cavorting around in front of mobs of people all out to try to forget their problems for an evening. And for a young man it can be a good enough way of life, if he happens to like it.