Piano Quotations

The public is like a piano. You just have to know what keys to poke.

Genetically, I have tons of musical background in my life. My mother's father was a famous Weimar-era composer, Ernst Toch. My father's mother was the head of the Vienna Conservatory's piano department. It all canceled out in my case. I'm completely hopeless in music.

I'm going to have classical piano lessons next.

I started writing songs when I was real young, when I was 3 years old. The piano spoke to me - I don't remember when I wasn't playing piano. My second grade talent show was the first time I performed my own thing. I dressed up as Dracula and played a song called 'Monster Rock' that I wrote. And I won.

I came from a really musical family. I studied classical piano because my grandparents were piano teachers, but started doing musical theater at age nine in Fresno, California, and went to a performing arts high school. That was my life.

I just love crafting and shaping sounds. Actually, many of the sounds that I work with start off as organic instruments - guitar, piano, clarinet, etc. But I do love the rigidity of electronic drums.

Prayer is when you talk to God. Meditation is when you're listening. Playing the piano allows you to do both at the same time.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn't call it gestural crap

I grew up hard. I picked cotton and plowed with the mule and fixed the cars and played with the guitar and the piano.

Yeah, I don't like, um, I'm not interested in rock 'n' roll piano. I find it a little grating.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.

Those edges and turns teach control and discipline, just like finger exercises on the piano.

I actually write film music because I'm classically trained on the piano so as well as songwriting I also write actual film music that could be used for movies like war movies and love movies.

Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I would be happy at a piano bar, singing. I just want to home in on being the best singer I can be.

It's like that Simpsons joke - they're filming a cow in a movie and they go, 'OK, we'll tape a bunch of cats together to make a cow', and it's like, 'Why don't you just use a cow?'. For some reason that is novel - like, 'Oh, my guitar sounds like a piano and now if I can just get my piano to sound like my guitar'.

I love my music, so I want to produce, write, and serve my music. I've had to learn about EQ frequencies and programming and space and clutter and how to be a better piano or bass player - everything.

That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer.

So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.

I taught myself off records, Memphis Slim, them old piano players, then added to it. Yeah, hard and loud, beat it to pieces.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

Most days, I practice piano in the mornings and I spend the rest of the day painting.

I used to play the piano in the band, and so there's some horrendous scenes of me playing the keyboards.

I played piano as a kid; I still play a little bit.

The basic idea is always constructed around piano or guitar and a voice, that's what we live and die by, because if you build up from that foundation, it's going to be strong.

I had a great childhood. Even though I never had my own room - I shared the porch with my grandfather and kept my belongings in one drawer of a dresser that was jammed next to the piano - I never went hungry and was always supported by my family.

I started piano when I was four. My mom taught me. And then I went to Manhattan School of Music during high school, like every Saturday. And then I went to Berklee for college, in Boston.

I've always wanted to smash a guitar over someone's head. You just can't do that with a piano.

When I was a kid, my parents encouraged me to take many different classes. Piano was one that I really fell in love with.

With the piano I'm completely in control of the gestural situation-not that I'm going to play the piece myself, but I know what's difficult, what's impossible.

I play any piano with a good tune.

I was a halfway-decent-looking English boy who looked nice in a drawing-room standing by a piano.

My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.

My grandmother played the piano, and I used to toddle over there and pick out little things that sounded good to me.

I'm a kid for a living: I get to play the piano for a living.

All I need is a big surfboard and a piano.

My love of music comes from as long as I remember. I begged my mum to learn piano for a year when I was 4; she wanted to make sure I was serious, and I wanted to be Chuck Berry when I grew up! We were a very musical family; my mum would play guitar, and her, my dad and aunt would sing and harmonize!

I can play piano, and I write everything on piano, but I don't really feel like a piano player, necessarily.

I wrote my first piano piece when I was in 4th grade.

Pianos tend to get better as they age, the more you play them. They grow into their sound.

I'm quite proud of my piano playing. Robin's never played a note on the piano at our recording sessions. I just wish I could be appreciated musically now.

It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.

I liked the piano. I always liked playing. I just hated homework.

I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano.

You can take lessons to become almost anything: flying lessons, piano lessons, skydiving lessons, acting lessons, race car driving lessons, singing lessons. But there's no class for comedy. You have to be born with it. God has to give you this gift.

I don't put boundaries on myself when I sit at the piano

I was much more interested in the orchestra than the piano, but I did become fairly proficient as a pianist and my teachers felt I had talent and wanted me to become a good concert pianist and earn my living that way.

My mom was in a band for over 30 years, and my brother, sister, and I start taking classical piano lessons when we were three. She's really the reason why I'm still playing piano - she made me practice every day before school and made it a priority even when we didn't necessarily want it to be.

I like 'Goodbye My Lover' because it's a really personal song and I recorded it in my landlady's bathroom in Los Angeles. She had a piano in there and for me listening back to it, it actually sounds like the voice I hear in my head. It's so close to what I can imagine.

It is my aim, my destination in life to make the cello as beloved an instrument as the violin and piano.

I really wanted to find a piano for the farm house. There were so many free pianos on Craigslist, I thought, 'Let's get as many free pianos as we can and stick them all in the barn.' I got eight in a short period of time, only six of which were tunable, but it's still quite funny.

You know, when I was younger I was into all kinds of art - drawing, painting, all that stuff. But I played drums, played piano forever.

I wanted to play piano, and that slid quickly into writing - it wasn't enough to play other people's notes: I had to write notes too.

I came from a folk-family background. Although we weren't really the all-singing, all-dancing-around-the-piano folkies or anything like that, there is that idea of singing and playing with your parents and your family and your cousins.

I grew up taking piano lessons and liking Wagner when I was in second grade.

I think I'm a very poor piano player.

I think my love of music comes from my dad. I was born with an ear for music, like him, and started with the piano when I was 4 but fell in love with the drums. My dad always has music playing.

In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.

When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have.

Apart from my work, my greatest pleasures have been mainly out-of-doors, and although I no longer ski, I greatly enjoy walking in the mountains and leading country rambles. I am fond of music, whether light or classical, and play the piano in a self-taught way. In company, I enjoy lively, way-out discussions.

Football management is such a pressurised thing - horseracing is a release. I'm also learning to play the piano - I'm quite determined - it's another release from the pressure of my job.

The same way that some people can play the piano, I can do plots! They just come!

Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

I hope to refine music, study it, try to find some area that I can unlock. I don't quite know how to explain it but it's there. These can't be the only notes in the world, there's got to be other notes some place, in some dimension, between the cracks on the piano keys.

My hands look terrible but I can do anything I want to do, so, you know, I just think I'm playing all around with more good taste and not dashing up and down the piano.

I'm an interpreter of stories. When I perform it's like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

I didn't want my last chapter to be the guy who sits at the piano and sings love songs.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

What resonates with me now is the acoustic guitar and piano.

I actually play piano and violin, but I don't have a passion for it. It didn't make me wake up in the morning wanting to do it, or go to bed thinking about it.

When I was a kid, I played the piano for six years, and all my family are musicians.

I wake up in the morning, walk downstairs, and just bang on the piano and write about what's going on in the world around me.

All my musical foundations go back to the age of 3. My family tell me that I used to listen to the old crystal set, then go to the piano and pick out the tune that I just heard.

There was a lot of music in our home. Mom played piano in church and gave piano lessons.

I never had any social life, just played the piano and studied, studied, studied.

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

When I was young, I just sat down and started playing Chopsticks at the piano. I got so far and then lost interest. Eventually, I regained it and started writing songs.

I was ballet dancing at four, playing piano by six, and doing commercials by 12. When I was 21, I was on the number one live comedy show in Puerto Rico. I told my parents, 'I'm going to New York to become a performer.' And I left.

And I've played piano since I was little, so I was originally the piano player in the band.

The piano is the X factor. People have a tough time following the structures when there's no piano there, spelling it out. It makes it more easily understood, particularly to people who don't know as much about music.

I grew up in such a musical family, and my dad was the first chair in the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra, and my mom was a piano teacher and a painter, so it was kind of a creative environment, and it was kind of in my DNA.

'The Conversation' was a movie I saw probably for the first time in the early 2000s. I immediately loved the piano and just how simple it is.

I have more energy at the end than I do at the beginning. You can be so beat up that you can scarcely walk on stage but when you get to the piano the excitement kicks in, you forget about being tired.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

I love music and I enjoy creating sounds. I got into making music when I was a child, starting with the spoons and the koto before moving onto the piano.

I play piano and trumpet. I studied classical guitar.

I'm basically a cocktail jazz kind of pianist. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very good keyboard player. People think I think I'm good. I think I'm a very poor piano player.

Every day a piano doesn't fall on my head is good luck.

I had piano lessons when I was younger, but I quit because I didn't want to sit and learn the scales.

I had this spooky psychological thing about 'The Piano' before it began, which was how everybody was going to go nuts on the set. Because a film tends to set up the way people are going to behave.

I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of 'Plans' came out of samples and vocal lines.

The piano is a universal instrument. If you start there, learn your theory and how to read, you can go on to any other instrument.

I grew up the son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister, so I was really close to the church and sang church music between sips at my bottle, you know? I sat on the piano bench next to my mother. She was the church organist, so that music is deeply inside of me.

It's like a whole orchestra, the piano for me. And also it's to me the greatest instrument. I shouldn't say that, but I believe that this is the only instrument I can really feel happy about playing.

I'm a first - I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist. I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing.

Frank liked me because I went nuts on the piano using feet, head, whatever I could find to bang on the piano.