An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

That's the clarinet I used to use... but it's just a piece of wood, you know, with holes in it and they put these clumsy keys on it and you're supposed to try to take that and manipulate it with throat muscles and chops... and try to make something happen that never happened before. And when you do, you never forget it. It beats sex, it beats anything.

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

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

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

Somebody asked me once, 'Do you think that swing will ever come back?' And I said, 'Do you think the 1938 Ford will ever come back?'

Jazz was born out of the whiskey bottle, was raised on marijiana, and will expire on cocaine.