“I don't play the tuba. The tuba plays me. My tuba is not actually a tuba, because it has never produced a musical sound. It is actually a giant frog pretending to be a tuba.”

“They'd been played. By a tuba!”

“In the smoky firelight the two old men nodded off like a pair of ancient kings passing the aeons in their tumuli. Made a musical notation of their snores. Elgar is to be played by a bass tuba, Ayrs a bassoon.”

“And the people next door oppress me all night long. I tell them, I work all day, a man's got to have some time to learn to play the tuba. That's oppression, that is. If I'm not under the heel of the oppressor, I don't know who is.”

“I was still carrying the tuba, for no reason other than that, in my current circumstances, it passed for good company. That's another way of saying it was all I had.”

“Your questions regarding that gentleman are very delicate, very subtle, very much like being smacked in the head with a mallet...it's a tuba among the flutes.”

“The piece you have written for us is called "The Gambol of the Caribou." Now, Mr. Steenwilly, I don't mean to be critical. What I know about music could be squeezed into a peanut shell, and there would still be room for the peanut. But I looked up "gambol" in the dictionary, and it means to "skip or jump about playfully." It also means to "caper or frolic." Caribou are large, ponderous, woolly reindeer.They do not gambol. They do not caper. They do not frolic. And they certainly do not skip. It would be an interesting sight to see a herd of caribou skipping down the tundra, but, Mr. Steenwilly, it would never happen. You could write a piece called "The Caribou Standing Still and Freezing Their Butts Off." Or "The March of the Caribou." Or even "The Stampede of the Caribou." But "The Gambol of the Caribou" is not such a great image to build a piece of music around.”