Piano 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

Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in. ~ Mose Allison

I am surprising myself [at] each show, and the delivered piano often surprises me. Sometimes the piano is so old that I don't have to prepare it, and sometimes I have a concert grand! ~ Volker Bertelmann

Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's Centre Georges Pompidou of 1971-1977 - the true prototype of the modern museum as popular architectural spectacle - wound up costing so much more than planned that the French government solved the shortfall by cutting support for several regional museums. ~ Martin Filler

Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant - for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost
unbearable - who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery,
perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone.
And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished
beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection
which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity. ~ Albert Camus

I think having musical training as a child was really, really important. I studied piano as a child. Piano is a great instrument to understand musical theory on. I think I have that in my brain somewhere. ~ Corin Tucker

In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and then swishing down and thump on the ground, the hiss of water coming off the mountain. ~ Anna Quindlen

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

As a kid, I was always listening to music. I would just go in to my room and put on an album, read the lyrics, and just spend hours and hours in there. Plus, my sister Laurie played piano (in fact she taught me my first few notes) so music was always around one way or another. ~ Andrew Hollander

PIANO, n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by pressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience. ~ Ambrose Bierce

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo. ~ Beryl Markham

I think of my father growing up in South Jersey, the son of second-generation German immigrant glassblowers. The opportunities for him of feeling that aspiration, that yearning, get out of the small town, connect to a larger world, get yourself to New York, wanting to play the piano at every opportunity, bonding with people who were on a similar path, ending up in Provincetown, which was kind of nexus for nonconformity, and artistic dropout reality. ~ Anne Waldman

And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.

I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory. ~ Fernando Pessoa

You can't learn to swim on a piano bench. ~ Milton H. Erickson

When I was first starting out as a kid, I tried to pad my resume with everything I had ever done - ice-skate, carry a tune. I can't dance for my life, but I can learn, so I'll tell people I can dance. I play the piano - I'm a really good pianist, actually. ~ Alexandra Daddario

At the piano, I'm able to communicate in a way that is very intimate and direct. My approach at music is a bit like talking to a friend. You don't have to be very complicated when you speak. If you say what's in your heart, it's usually very simple. ~ David Lanz

I think any parent that makes their kid sit at a piano against their will and practice, they're going to have a kid that's not going to want to play the piano. ~ Debbie Gibson

Now I approach climbing differently. I have learned less effort and energy, less obsession, and more feeling, as with piano, more emphasis and less frenzy. ~ Pat Ament

I urge pupils when studying a work and in order to master its most important aspic, the rhythmic structure, or the ordering of the time process, to do just what a conductor does with the score: to place music on the desk and to conduct the work from beginning to end as if it were played by someone else, an imaginary pianist with the conductor trying to impress him with his will, his tempo first of all, plus all the details of his performance. ~ Heinrich Neuhaus

Eventually Frances was credited with writing 325 scripts covering every conceivable genre. She also directed and produced half a dozen films, was the first Allied woman to cross the Rhine in World War I, and served as the vice president and only woman on the first board of directors of the Screen Writers Guild. She painted, sculpted, spoke several languages fluently, and played "concert caliber" piano. Yet she claimed writing was "the refuge of the shy" and she shunned publicity; she was uncomfortable as a heroine, but she refused to be a victim. ~ Cari Beauchamp

There is nothing like tasting the grit of fear for rediscovering that the umbilical cord is made of piano wire. ~ Moss Hart

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

The day I went to see my father to say I wanted to become an architect, he was a bit surprised, because for him being a builder is much more than being just an architect. He was very angry, and I never thought I could do something else. ~ Renzo Piano

She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it. ~ Charles Dickens

But later that night, as I brush my teeth in the bathroom, I overhear Baba and Thaya Jaan talking in the guest room next door. "

All this music all the time. You shouldn't let Amina do so much singing and piano," Thaya Jaan says.

I stop brushing and strain to hear every word, trying to follow.

"But, Bhai Jaan, she is so talented. Her music teachers say she is really quite gifted."

"Yes, but music is forbidden in Islam. It's a waste of time and has no benefit. Instead of filling her head with music, she should focus on memorizing Quran."

The toothpaste suddenly tastes bitter. I spit it out and wait to hear what Baba will say. Surely he'll say the things he's always told me, like how music makes him feel closer to God and that my talent is a gift from Allah.

But all Baba says is, "Yes, Bhai Jaan," and then he stays quiet.

I am numb. Is Thaya Jaan right? Am I doing something wrong? ~ Hena Khan

Once I started playing the piano, after my first small competition, I realized that the piano was the right instrument for me. ~ Rafal Blechacz

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony. ~ Gyorgy Ligeti

The thing with the piano is, the piano is like percussion almost - well, it is. You have to ... not beat on it, but there is more work involved than a Hammond. With a Hammond, you just lay your hands on the keys, man, and you're gone. ~ Gregg Allman

A lawyer's relationship to justice and wisdom is on a par with a piano tuner's relationship to a concert. He neither composes the music, nor interprets it-he merely keeps the machinery running. ~ Lucille Kallen

It's a magical thing, the guitar. It allows you to be the whole band in one, to play rhythm and melody, sing over the top. And as an instrument for solos, you can bend notes, draw emotional content out of tiny movements, vibratos and tonal things which even a piano can't do. ~ David Gilmour

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it. ~ Tom Lehrer

When you're a child, you take things for granted. For instance, my mum didn't have a lot of money, but I went to piano, ballet and gymnastics lessons, and tae kwon do. ~ Holliday Grainger

Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that's now not there. ~ Elliott Carter

I actually prefer it if I don't know what I'm supposed to do. If you've got an equal temperament piano keyboard, then you know what you're going to get if you play certain chords. But I actually like it if you don't know where the notes are, because then you do it intuitively. You're working out a new language, basically. New rules. ~ Aphex Twin

I had piano lessons at five and started guitar at ten, but although music and acting was always around me, my parents never pressured me into it. ~ Micky Dolenz

I actually write more on guitar than I do on piano. ~ Norah Jones

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

He was the only world-famous piano virtuoso who abhorred his public and also actually withdrew definitively from this abhorred public. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Why do you want to know?"
The shrug again. "Just wondering."
"Really. You've skipped your lawn tennis or duck hunting or whiskey drinking or whatever else people of your sort do all day, only to come all the way out to the island to ask me about the piano piece. Because you were just wondering." I pushed away from the door. "Coming here to kiss me would have been more believable."
"Well, it was second on my list."
"I'm not intimidated by you," I said, blunt. "If you're hoping I'll turn out to be some pathetic, blubbering little rag-girl who begs you not to ruin her, you're in for a surprise."
"That's good." Lord Armand met my eyes. "I like surprises."
We gazed at each other, he on the bed and me by the door, neither of us giving quarter. It seemed to me that the room was growing even more dim, that time was repeating the same ploy it had pulled in Jesse's cottage, drawing out long and slow. The storm outside railed against the castle walls, drowning the air within. It layered darkness through Armand's eyes, the once-vivid blue now deep as the ocean at night.
Beyond my window the rain fell and fell, fat clouds weeping as if they'd never stop.
"Nice bracelet," Armand said softly. "Did you steal it?"
I shook my head. "You gave it to me."
"Did I?"
"As far as everyone else if concerned, yes. You did."
"Hmm. And what do I get in return for agreeing to be your…benefactor?"
"The answer to your question."
"No kiss?" ~ Shana Abe

Somewhere along the line Coltrane's soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it's McCoy Tyner's piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody's - a nameless, faceless somebody's - dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that's how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest. ~ Haruki Murakami

I had a dream about you. You were learning to compose music like Mozart, and I was learning to listen like Beethoven. He was deaf, and you were blind to the fact that you had no musical talent. Still, I wore my ear plugs and I clapped and cheered while you banged away on the piano. ~ Jarod Kintz

Music is my passion, singing, performing. I play piano and musical theater is my background. ~ Janel Parrish

A truly great piano is one that enables you to convey deep emotion ~ Sviatoslav Richter

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! ~ Natalia Tena

I play guitar, the ukulele and the piano. I grew up on a mountain in Tennessee, and we had 'The Mountain Opry,' where anyone could just get up on stage to perform. It was just about the soul and heart of music. My upbringing was less about being great and more about just doing what you love. It was always for joy. ~ Rachel Boston

The piano is really the featured instrument of a 10-piece chamber orchestra. The construction is the harmonic language. ~ Howard Shore

You think it matters to the kids whether they're learning to play on a Steinway or a normal piano? ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I took classical piano for a couple of years, but I sort of lost interest - I couldn't read a note today if I tried. I still enjoy that stuff, and I think I naturally gravitate towards the classical licks; in fact, I know that I do. I gravitate towards the classical licks that I heard by famous old composers. ~ Tom Scholz

From an early age I've written songs and played the piano. ~ Ella Henderson

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

This book came to me for review, but when I observed its count of pages I quietly dropped it behind the piano. ~ H.L. Mencken

The guitar gives you a lot of space to cover for yourself, but there's not a lot of room for that on piano. ~ Guy Picciotto

I started off with violin, then I started learning guitar, then I went to piano. But I self-taught piano just because I enjoyed it. I've always really enjoyed music. ~ Jesse Spencer

My dad sung and played piano. But he was also a man of God. He was a minister. So when Sam Cooke would come in town, you know, with The Soul Stirrers at that time, he was singing gospel, they would end up at my dad's church, and it would always be a guest singer for Sunday morning. ~ Merry Clayton

I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o'clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous. ~ Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

I write my songs many times to chord progressions on a piano. Unfortunately, I can't keep playing the piano, so I just record it into the software. ~ Nadia Ali

Jace Herondale plays the piano very well."
"And he knows it."
"That sounds like a Herondale." Tessa laughed. ~ Cassandra Clare

I tend to write on an acoustic guitar or the piano. I have kind of a rule: if I can't sit down and play this and get the song over, I don't take it to the band, because most any good song, you can sit down and deliver it with a piano or a guitar. ~ Tom Petty

There was always a piano in the house when I was growing up - my dad played, and I thought it was cool - and when I was eight, I begged my parents to let me have lessons. After a couple of weeks, I wanted to give up, but my parents were very focused and made me keep going, which I'm very pleased about now. ~ Laura Mvula

With just one musician, you can really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano, if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard. ~ John Cage

I don't come from a musical family at all, but I realized early on I was a musician. I started begging for a piano when I was 6 years old. ~ Jason Robert Brown

When I did get signed and I was going around letting people know what I was about, that's exactly how I did it: me on the piano, playing a couple of songs I'd written and talking to the people in between. That's how I got my performance chops up. ~ Alicia Keys

I play a bunch of instruments, like piano, drums, guitar and bass. And the kazoo every now and then. I'm trying to learn how to play the trumpet and the saxophone. That's what I'm learning how to play. ~ Mac Miller

The pedal is the soul of the piano. ~ Anton Rubinstein

I wanted to love this piano. I wanted to invite music back into my life. ~ Thad Carhart

It is next to impossible to learn a complex skill by observation alone. One does not learn to play the violin by watching Heifitz or the piano by observing Rubenstein. ~ David Elkind

I wrote my first song when I was twelve on the piano. ~ Rachael Yamagata

We are going to pick up our instruments and play Mozart,"
Honoria announced. "And we are going to do it with smiles on our
faces."
"I have no idea what any of you are talking about," Daisy said.
"I will play," Sarah said, "but I make no promises about a
smile." She looked at the piano and blinked. "And I am not picking
up my instrument."
Iris actually giggled. Then her eyes lit up. "I could help you."
"Pick it up?"
Iris's grin grew positively devilish. "The window is not far ... "
"I knew I loved you," Sarah said with a wide smile. ~ Julia Quinn

We get along, we talk music.Lenny Kravitz took me to Harlem to see this little jazz show in the back of a church. It was just shitty fluorescent lights and a small stage piano, but this band tore it up. ~ Penn Dayton Badgley

I taught myself to play the piano, because I wanted to play it. ~ Jackson Browne

If I hadn't been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house. ~ Harry S. Truman

I loved grand pianos and small pianos, too. ~ Alicia Keys

I could hear my friends outside playing soccer while I was expected to stay inside practicing the piano. It was like torture! ~ Ildar Abdrazakov

I very rarely play the piano at home. Deliberately, so that when I do play it, I love it. ~ Bryan Ferry

I play the harmonium. I had learned to use the guitar for a bit before becoming a part of the music industry, but unfortunately didn't pursue it fully. I would love to learn to play the piano because it holds a unique connect for me in terms of rhythm. ~ Kailash Kher

Everything that has a spare piano is 'like Satie' and everything with strings is 'filmic,' Sometimes I get annoyed when they say my stuff sounds 'like Satie'. No, it doesn't. At least, I don't think so. ~ Agnes Obel

Just this morning you didn't seem as though you had an aversion to me. You're here in your dying patient's house, eating dinner with his wife, drinking his whiskey and watching his wife play the piano in a dark room," she shook her head and pouted her lips. "You're already in bed with me. ~ Dave Newell

I took classical piano lessons from the age of five. ~ Eddie Van Halen

They were keen for me still to play the piano, which I was going to, but 45 minutes of piano would be extremely boring. I like a bit of light and shade. ~ Keith Emerson

Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes ... all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating. ~ Phil Cousineau

It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~ Victor De Laprade

Maybe I can tell you," said Miss Maudie. "If your father's anything, he's civilized in his heart. Marksmanship's a gift of God, a talent - oh, you have to practice to make it perfect, but shootin's different from playing the piano or the like. I think maybe he put his gun down when he realized that God had given him an unfair advantage over most living things. I guess he decided he wouldn't shoot till he had to, and he had to today." "Looks like he'd be proud of it," I said. "People in their right minds never take pride in their talents," said Miss Maudie. We ~ Harper Lee

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album? ~ Milan Kundera

I have long admired Steinway pianos for their qualities of tone, clarity, pitch consistency, touch responsiveness, and superior craftsmanship. ~ Billy Joel

I love school and science; I also love piano and music. ~ Isaac Hempstead-Wright

My father had a piano that was a nickelodeon - put a nickel, and the roller would play. ~ Frank Sinatra

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 like the piano - I'm always about 15 feet away from a piano. ~ Brian Wilson

After a while, though, you realize that a whole slew of young singer-songwriter piano players are getting compared to you. That's when you feel the passage of time is occurring. ~ Tori Amos

One should leave the piano when Oscar comes in. This man is dangerous. ~ Marian McPartland

As for the orchestra,' Quinsonnas continued, 'it has fallen very low since his instrument no longer suffices to feed the instrumentalist! Talk about a trade that's not practical. Ah, if we could use the power wasted on the pedals of a piano for pumping water out of coal mines! If the air escaping from ophicleides could also be used to turn the Catacomb Company's windmills! If the trombone's alternating action could be applied to a mechanical sawmill - oh, then the executants would be rich and many! ~ Jules Verne

I never like to play for myself, and that is why I don't own a grand piano. To play for yourself is like looking at yourself in a mirror. I like to practice; that is to work at a task. But to play there must be an audience. New things happen when you play for an audience. You don't know what will occur. You make discoveries with the music, and it is always the first time. It is an exchange, a communion. ~ Hephzibah Menuhin

Love.
That was the piece that had been missing, way before Prague. That was that piece that had been missing in her life until Will came and made her feel it, for their work together and for the beauty and also for him, though it was hard sometimes to separate those things. Maybe she didn`t love Will like she thought. Or couldn't in this moment.
But what they'd done together, what had been open by becoming so close, she could still love that. She could love their conversations and their hours at the piano and the results of their work. She could even love the way it hurt right now, because when was the last time she gave her whole heart to something?
That, all of it, belonged to her. She didn't have to let Will take it away, the way she'd let her grandfather, the business, herself, take her love for music. ~ Sara Zarr

A piano store looks like a funeral parlor for music. ~ Ramon Gomez De La Serna

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano. ~ James Whistler

I have these big piano-playing hands. I feel like I should be picking potatoes. ~ Sandra Bullock

The library door is already open when I dash in, but the room is empty. Books line shelves three floors high, and windows just as tall let in rays of dying sunlight. Three balconies wrap above me and a grand piano stands in the center of the bottom level, but there are no people, not even a servant dusting old books in a corner. ~ Sara Raasch

have been in the war? Suddenly she said, "Are you the piano player, upstairs?" For that was how she and John had come to refer to him, The piano player, upstairs. He turned his nose to her again, warily now. "I play," he said. She nodded. "We hear you," she told him. "My husband and I, we listen," she said. Every ~ Alice McDermott

All my momma's people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano. ~ Dolly Parton

I am trying to see things in perspective. My dog wants a bite of my peanut butter chocolate chip bagel. I know she cannot have this, because chocolate makes dogs very sick. My dog does not understand this. She pouts and wraps herself around my leg like a scarf and purrs and tries to convince me to give her just a tiny bit. When I do not give in, she eventually gives up and lays in the corner, under the piano, drooping and sad. I hope the universe has my best interest in mind like I have my dog's. When I want something with my whole being, and the universe withholds it from me, I hope the universe thinks to herself: "Silly girl. She thinks this is what she wants, but she does not understand how it will hurt. ~ Blythe Baird