Piano Quotes

Could I imagine being a piano? That'd be awesome. I'd throw a D-minor at you to make you sad, then an F-major to make you happy!

I tell my piano the things I used to tell you

My piano is to me what a ship is to the sailor, what a steed is to the Arab. It is the intimate personal depository of everything that stirred wildly in my brain during the most impassioned days of my youth. It was there that all my wishes, all my dreams, all my joys, and all my sorrows lay.

Your body is merely a machine made to express the thoughts that flow through you and nothing more. It is but an instrument for you to express your imagings just as a piano is an instrument for a musician to express his imagings. Just as the piano is not the musician, so, likewise, your body is not you.

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

Never was I so devout as when I composed The Creation. I knelt down each day to pray to God to give me strength for my work....When I was working on The Creation I felt so impregnated with Divine certainty, that before sitting down to the piano, I would quietly and confidently pray to God to grant me the talent that was needed to praise Him worthily.

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.

If you have total freedom, then you are in trouble. It's much better when you have some obligation, some discipline, some rules. When you have no rules, then you start to build your own rules.

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.

For the most part, pianos are female to me. Sometimes they're dykes, and they're always good fun.

I play drums, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, french horn, piano.

Piano playing consists of common sense, heart and technical resources. All three should be equally developed. Without common sense you are a fiasco, without technique an amateur, without heart a machine. The profession does have its hazards.

My school life was very much a wandering experience. I was having trouble in school and I was not making a lot of friends. So coming home and actually improvising on the piano and just coming up with melodies was an escape for me.

Get up from that piano. You hurtin' its feelings.

One does not play the piano with one's fingers, one plays the piano with one's mind.

Many people have asked me why there are three pedals in these grand pianos. Well the pedal in the middle is there to separate the two other pedals.

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

If you want to play piano, you just gotta love piano, and I loved the way that music sounded from the beginning. Always did - everything about an instrument I loved.

Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.

You cannot play the piano well unless you are singing within you.

I always wanted to be a full-time musician. Every television job I had was a means to buy a grand piano, or to put in a recording studio, or something like that.

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.

The piano's world encompasses glass-nerved virtuos and stomping barrel-housers in fedoras; it is a world of pasture and storm, of perfumed smoke, of liquid mathematics.

My appearance was always good and my ability to play on the piano, especially ragtime, which was then at the height of its vogue, made me a welcome guest.

When you play, never mind who listens to you.

On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing 'Abide with Me' in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates

Every day I lugged my backpack through the halls, waiting for the final bell. Then I'd race home and hole up in my room, playing the drums and the piano, composing music.

Lindsey [Buckingham] and I went up to Aspen and we went to somebody's incredible house and they had a piano and I had my guitar with me and I went in their living room, looking out over the incredible Aspen sky and I wrote 'Landslide.'

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.

Bravery is a complicated thing to describe. You can't say it's three feet long and two feet wide and that it weighs four hundred pounds or that it's colored bright blue or that it sounds like a piano or that it smells like roses. It's a quality, not a thing.

Did you know that Mozart had no arms and no legs? I've seen statues of him on people's pianos.

Touch me ‘til my ribs become piano keys, ‘til there is sheet music scrolled across the inside of my lungs.

False notes [on the piano] are human. Why does everything have to be perfect? You know, perfection itself is imperfection.

Steinway is the only piano on which the pianist can do everything he wants. And everything he dreams.

O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors

In one of our concert grand pianos, 243 taut strings exert a pull of 40,000 pounds on an iron frame. It is proof that out of great tension may come great harmony.

The music is within your heart, your soul, your spirit, and this is all I did when I sat at piano. I just go within.

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

To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra.

When I was a kid I'd practise Chopin on piano - and I love Chopin! He's my dawg! Then I'd go out on the stoop and blast the radio. I'm from New York, the concrete jungle. Hip-hop influenced me from day one.

Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.

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

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

Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.

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

A Composition on the Piano

I do triage on everything that comes through the door, and if it's not something we need (now, for real-not maybe someday) or something that deserves to be saved for posterity, it's discarded. I stop before I let myself drop something into a drawer or set it down on the piano. 'Where does it belong?' I think. If I don't have a place for it, I make a place.

When I don't like a piece of music, I make a point of listening to it more closely

The Steinway piano is the most harmonious implement for musical intention. It completes what is beautiful and artistic.

Rugby players are either piano shifters or piano movers. Fortunately, I am one of those who can play a tune.