Piano Music Quotes

I grew up listening to a lot of player-piano music in my house and a lot of old Tin Pan Alley songs and American standards. My dad listened to a lot of traditional Irish music and I grew up doing musical theater. So most of the music I was exposed to as a kid was pre-rock n' roll. ~ John C. Reilly

When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano. ~ Bob Hope

She paused, and said, "May I ask you a question?" He said, "Sure." "Are we having dinner?" "That's what it said on the menu. Lunch was different, and this sure ain't breakfast." "No, I mean having dinner, as opposed to grabbing road food." "As in candlelight and piano music?" "Not necessarily." "Violin players and guys selling roses?" "If appropriate." "Like a date?" She said, "Broadly, I suppose." He said, "Honest answer?" "Always." "Suppose we had found Keever yesterday, maybe stepping off the train, or fallen over in a wheat field somewhere, with a sprained ankle, somewhat hungry and thirsty but otherwise OK, then yes, for sure I would have asked you out to dinner, and if you had accepted, then we'd be having that dinner right about now, so I guess this half-qualifies. ~ Lee Child

Without a piano I don't know how to stand, don't know what to do with my hands. ~ Norah Jones

Translator's Note: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music", the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano. ~ John Ciardi

I am so in the past. I'm such a Luddite when it comes to making music. All I can do is write at the piano. ~ Elton John

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end. ~ Igor Stravinsky

They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard. ~ Haruki Murakami

It's quite hard to have your mom as a teacher - it's like, she's not necessarily a 'real teacher' for me. But she'd always teach me to really hear the music, and develop my ear, and to try and hear the harmonics of the piano. ~ Birdy

I still have a passion for the music, which is such a beautiful thing. I still wake up in the middle of the night out of a dream and have a melody in my head, and run to my piano. ~ Teena Marie

The piano is the social instrument par excellence ... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment. ~ Jacques Barzun

In France the music schools are a bit old fashioned. I was more excited about doing my own stuff or to play with my friend in my band, than studying the piano. ~ Yann Tiersen

It was true that Odette played vilely, but often the most memorable impression of a piece of music is one that has arisen out of a jumble of wrong notes struck by unskilful fingers upon a tuneless piano. ~ Marcel Proust

I always make sure that the lid over the keyboard is open before I start to play. ~ Artur Schnabel

I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right. ~ Duke Ellington

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano. ~ Gary Oldman

The sky was always full of birdsong and evening smells, piano music from a window, the stone buildings glowing against the blue, like cream poured over something tart and hot. ~ Olivia Sudjic

The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth. ~ Andres Segovia

I cannot write music. I cannot play the piano. ~ Jayne Meadows

Psychoanalyses is like music lessons, for 5 years you do not notice any progress and suddenly you can play the piano. ~ Woody Allen

As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano. ~ Michael Hersch

I also became inspired by impressionist painters such as Renoir, and wanted to do the same sort of thing with music-portray whatever mood strikes me the way Keith Jarrett does on piano. ~ Lenny Breau

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers. ~ Gioachino Rossini

I mean, give me a guitar, give me a piano, give me a broom and string, I wouldn't get bored anywhere. ~ Keith Richards

And so they played some of the world's loveliest piano music - the exiled homesick girl, the humiliated, tired old man. Not properly. Better than that. ~ Eva Ibbotson

People sort of know me for that solo piano music I did. ~ John Cale

American Ballet Theatre's rehearsal studios are at 890 Broadway, an old building where exposed pipes clank and hiss in uneven accompaniment to piano music. The high ceilings wear a toupee of dust. The wall paint peels like a newbie ballerina's toes. ~ Sascha Radetsky

My mother has always loved piano music and hungered to play. When she was in her early sixties, she retired from her job as a computer programmer so that she could devote herself more fully to the piano. As she had done with her dog obsession, she took her piano education to an extreme. She bought not one, not two, but three pianos.

One was the beautiful Steinway B, a small grand piano she purchased with a modest inheritance left by a friend of her parents'. She photocopied all of her music in a larger size so she could see it better and mounted it on manila folders. She practiced for several hours every day. When she wasn't practicing the piano she was talking about the piano.

I love pianos, too, and wrote an entire book about the life of one piano, a Steinway owned by the renowned pianist Glenn Gould. And I shared my mother's love for her piano. During phone conversations, I listened raptly as she told me about the instrument's cross-country adventures.

Before bringing the Steinway north, my mother had mentioned that she was considering selling it. I was surprised, but instead of reminding her that, last I knew, she was setting it aside for me, I said nothing, unable to utter the simple words, "But, Mom, don't you remember your promise?" If I did, it would be a way of asking for something, and asking my mother for something was always dangerous because of the risk of disappointment. ~ Katie Hafner

I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'. ~ Bob Newhart

I love making music, I love composing on my computer, just making crazy ethnic slack orchestral tracks, that's one of my fun things. ~ Casey Abrams

Music speaks of Platonic truth - the ideal river rather than the polluted reality, love as we dream it rather than we experience it, grief noble and uplifting rather than our distracted weeping. It is necessary to our survival and our sanity. ~ Pam Brown

Hip Hop Generation "captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as "post-this" or "post-that." ~ Jeff Chain

I'm not making any absurd comparisons between myself and Bach, but I aspire to that, that my music will have the legs to survive whatever context it finds itself in. ~ Steve Reich

Most days Lily is the steady drumbeat. The rhythm of my heart. The repeating melody of the music in my head. But not today. ~ Emily McKay

There is no room in music for the second-rate - it might just as well be the nineteenth-rate. ~ Gustav Holst

That's my fun time so, to me, doing my homework, studying on what I do, watching the movies, listening to music, all that inspires me so I focus a lot on that and practice. ~ Christina Milian

Flowing water is at once a picture and a music, which causes to flow at the same time from my brain, like a limpid and murmuring rivulet, sweet thoughts, charming reveries, and melancholy remembrances. ~ Alphonse Karr

Noble and manly music invigorates the spirit, strengthens the wavering man, and incites him to great and worthy deeds. ~ Homer

We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can't figure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and yet distressed because now you won't ever know what it had been all about. ~ Robert Penn Warren

What is normally called religion is what I would tend to call music - participating in music, listening to music, making records and singing. ~ Will Oldham

Well, I guess because most of my music is about surrender, change, sacrifice and love. You know the heartfelt stuff that would make a hit man puke ~ Lindsay Delagair

It's unfashionable to admit, but playing music makes us happy and makes us smile. ~ Chris Hesse

Music is universal too. Even deaf people like to dance, love rhythm, and can kind of pick it up. ~ Rainn Wilson

Music is a thing that changes people's lives. It has the capacity to make young people's lives better. ~ Noel Gallagher

I don't even know if hip-hop is music anymore. It's definitely rhythm. It's definitely tempo. It's definitely beats per minute. But it's product. And television is product placement for the most part. It's not passion. ~ CeeLo Green

Sing a song, read a poem, paint a picture, hear the music ... Rise up and touch the stars ~ Susan Polis Schutz

For the longest time, I didn't even want to admit I was serious about music. Before the Shins, I would tell myself, 'Oh, I'm going to figure something out someday.' I had this romantic vision of being this old dude maybe making guitars or something. ~ James Mercer

The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete - the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art - throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb. Not thus had she played on the little draped piano at the Bertolini, and "Too much Schumann" was not the remark that Mr. Beebe had passed to himself when she returned. ~ E. M. Forster

What's your name?" he asked above the roar of the music.
She leaned close. "My name is Wind," she whispered. "And Rain. And Bone and Dust. My name is a snippet of a half-remembered song."
He chuckled a low, delightful sound. She was drunk and silly, and so full of the glory of being young and alive and in the capital of the world that she could hardly contain herself.
"I have no name," she purred. "I am whoever the keepers of my fate tell me to be."
He grasped her by her wrist, running a thumb along the sensitive sknin underneath. "Then let me call you Mine for a dance or two. ~ Sarah J. Maas

I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing (Though I may write about cabmen. That's no matter.) But warm, eager, living life - to be rooted in life - to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for. ~ Katherine Mansfield

I've had to be a man since I was 12 or 13. I had a job. And I was playing the piano for people twice my age. Handling responsibility is what makes a man a man. ~ Jamie Foxx

Of course it's fantastic to have bands formed in garages, but there is a market for other types of music. ~ Rachel Stevens

Music is what I love to do; it's in my veins. ~ Demi Lovato

No one should be allowed to make music as if he were made of wood. One must reproduce the musical text exactly, but not play like a stone. ~ Olivier Messiaen

Before music there was silence and the duet format allows you to build from the silence in a very special way. ~ Charlie Haden

The goal is to be free and hopeful in the music. Because that's really the only intention you need. From there, every natural and powerful intention and feeling will, on its own, slide right out of you - out of your spirit. ~ Alex Ebert

Rock music will never die. We all know that. ~ M. Shadows

Words cannot always do the work we need them to. Music is there for when words fail us. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Driving home I switch on the radio and one of those old Motown voices comes on and reaches my heart. ~ Ellen Van Neerven

Music changes every three months. There's always new artists coming out. There's always new sounds. There is always a new hit coming out. You gotta stay relevant as much as you can and feed your fans as much as you can. ~ Tyga

I think too many people look at the arts with a religious outlook. Arts, music, singing and performing, it's all make-believe. ~ Vince Vaughn

If we are able to get inside the music and inhabit it convincingly enough, it will cause everyone to find each other in this new psychological space. And that's most exciting. ~ Michael Tilson Thomas

You're a master on blues piano. The real deal. ~ Jeffrey Wright