I wish to thank my parents for making it all possible? and I wish to thank my children for making it necessary.

The oboe sounds like a clarinet with a cold.

My father invented a cure for which there was no disease and unfortunately my mother caught it and died of it.

When I was a little boy and played Liebestraum, my father used to hit me on the head with a newspaper every time I slopped the cadenza . . . I hate Liebestraum.

Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.

And now, in honour of the 150th anniversary of Beethoven's death, I would like to play 'Clear the Saloon', er, 'Clair de Lune', by Debussy. I don't play Beethoven so well, but I play Debussy very badly, and Beethoven would have liked that.

Clarinets, like lawyers, have cases, mouthpieces, and they need a constant supply of hot air in order to function.