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

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.

When they were small and my wife really had no other responsibilities, except taking care of the family and all of us, it wasn't that big a deal. It was fun. Hey, we're going to Moscow. We're going to Italy. We're going to Toronto. We're going to New York.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

Moving from Wales to Italy is like moving to a different country.

Italy in the first years got food, for the first year or the first periods got food. Then we got raw materials and then we got tool machines, let's say, instruments for working.

When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well.

The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it.

In Holland and Spain and France, where so many of us come from, people aren't interested in the sex lives of their players. We don't hear these stories - even in Italy where the media is right on top of football.

I was a star in Italy, Austrailia, Germany and Japan before the American stations ever paid attention at all.

The role of Italy and of Austria has diminished as has that of France and Britain; Germany and Japan have suffered catastrophically.

You may have the universe if I may have Italy.

It is important to remember that some of the most serious thinkers once thought that democracy was not compatible with the cultures of Germany, Italy, Japan, Latin America and Russia.

During my first month in Italy I lived a nomadic life.

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.

Italy will always have the best food.

But we did the Pink Panther not in Hollywood, in Italy.

I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.

The political tradition of ancient thought, filtered in Italy by Machiavelli, says one thing clearly: every prince needs allies, and the bigger the responsibility, the more allies he needs.

I have had the problem of seeing my male model go to Italy and... stay there.