Woodwind Instrument Quotes

I am a saxophone player.

I started on the clarinet. I was going to a music school - my mother took me - and the guy said, 'What do you want to play?' I said the drums, and my mother said, 'No, you don't. You don't want to play the drums.' So I said, 'Maybe the trumpet would be cool.' And my mother said, 'I don't think so.' And then the clarinet was handed to me.

I don't know why, but I like the saxophone.

It is not solid wood that can become a flute, but the empty reed.

Clarinet n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments worse than a clarinet – two clarinets.

Bassoon is not an easy instrument to play and to pick it up and play it like a flute or a saxophone is quite an accomplishment.

I played the flute in elementary school, but when I got into high school, they didn't have any flutes; they gave me a clarinet and said, 'Play it in the same way, just hold in a different position.' I really didn't care much for it.

I'm working really hard to get the clarinet out of that hole, that Benny Goodman thing.

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

I understood that if I wanted to work, the saxophone was the main instrument. The clarinet was what we call a double.

I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder.

Bagpipes is a woodwind instrument, so you have to warm it up. But in a wrestling dressing room? You've got to be kidding me.

I'm practicing the oboe. But I don't play. Just single notes, not an entire piece of music.

It (the double-clarinet in India) was primarily used for snake charming, since the snake would do almost anything to get the Indians to stop playing it.

I wanted my voice to be a tenor sax, really.

I wanted to play saxophone, but all I could get were a few squeaks.

The flute is a weird instrument, especially when played solo.

The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has a medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball...I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon.

I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.

One other hobby of mine has been playing the oboe but I have not kept this up after 1969.

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.

Some people say 'flutist.' Others say 'flautist.' I just say 'flute player.' That's what I was.

I played saxophone for a while when I was a kid.

The clarinet has always been my baby. I just didn't know that for a while.