Because if you've got the wit, you can make anything into a melody, ultimately.

Then, of course, I played alto and tenor, wherever there were jobs.

The recording industry has changed; they're enjoying such incredible success in the pop field.

When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.

If you've only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.

The other saxophones, except as solo instruments, really don't have much point in the orchestra.

The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing.

I've appeared on some other people's albums.

So I played alto for quite a while until I saved up the money for the baritone.

I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.

Actually, it is a fact that I've been doing more writing than playing in recent years.

This life of being a transient human being has gotten to a point when it's very hard to bear.

In a way, I started out to be a baritone player.

People are approaching electronic levels in music; although not all of it happens to tickle my fancy.

Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones.

I'm fascinated with the electronic devices that we can mess around with.

When we've finished the current tour I'm going to go back to Italy and see if I can do some more writing.

Eliminating the piano means that I've always worked closer with the bass than most players.

You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it.

New York is still where I live most of the time.

Because if you've got the wit, you can make anything into a melody, ultimately.

People talk about innovations and evolutions and that kind of thing; I don't understand about that nonsense. It's like, all instruments are there to use all the time.

The baritone can serve functions that the alto and tenor cannot, in orchestral voicing.

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it's the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what's available, what somebody happens to play for you.

The first reason for starting to do the symphony concerts was to play this new piece of mine.

You start way down on a low B flat on the tuba and you have a chromatic scale; you can match the colours all the way up, till you get to the top of the trumpet.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.

It's true I've always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral way, rather than a band way.

I've always wanted a C trumpet on top, to have that same kind of facility without shouting.

For those whose wit becomes the mother of villainy, those it educates to be evil in all things.

Man forgives woman anything save the wit to outwit him.

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

A wit should be no more sincere than a woman constant.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

Wit is the most rascally, contemptible, beggarly thing on the face of the earth.

I'm keeping my acerbic wit completely fueled.

And wit's the noblest frailty of the mind.

Where might is mixed with wit, there is too good an accord in a government.

There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.

Woman: the peg on which the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch and the sinner his justification.

Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, but God to man doth speak in solitude.

Your wit makes others witty.

Who would not give up wit for power and beauty?

It is always the same: women bedeck themselves with jewels and furs, and men with wit and quotations.

There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.