Piano Playing Quotes:

I notice guys playing the piano playing a part up here and a part down there, and I wandered why couldn't I do that on the guitar?

- Steve Young

source: Interview with Gordon Ames, www.outlawmagazine.com. May 2, 2012.

topic: Piano, Piano Playing, Guitar

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

- Tom Lehrer

topic: Life, Music, Play, Keyboard Players, Piano Keys

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

- Andres Segovia

topic: Piano, Monsters, Teeth, Classic Music, Piano Playing

When you play, never mind who listens to you.

- Robert Schumann

source: Robert Schumann (1860). “Advice to Young Musicians”, p.10

topic: Music, Piano, Play, Keyboard Players, Inspirational Music

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

- Maya Angelou

topic: Music, Loneliness, Space, Notes Music, Spiritual Music

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

- Victor Hugo

topic: Music, Wisdom, Silence, Jazz And Life, Music Life

My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. To tell the truth, there's hardly a difference.

- Harry S. Truman

source: "The Wit & Wisdom of Harry Truman".

topic: Life, Music, Wisdom, Piano Playing, Player 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.

- Vladimir Horowitz

topic: Heart, Piano, Common Sense, Piano Playing

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

- Bob Hope

topic: Music, Play, Names, Steinway Piano, Piano Playing

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

- Artur Schnabel

topic: Play, Keyboards, Funny Music, Piano Playing, Piano Music

The piano has been drinking, not me.

- Tom Waits

topic: Music, Drinking, Piano, Piano Playing, Piano Music

Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

- Oscar Wilde

source: Impressions of America (1906). The Newark (Ohio) Daily Advocate, 20 Apr. 1883, describes an afterdinner speech made by Wilde in Paris about his experiences in the United States: "The brightest and best of the many stories he related was one to the effect that at a ball in Leadville he saw a notice over the piano which read: 'Please don't shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.' "

topic: Funny, Sarcasm, Piano Music, Piano Playing, Piano Lesson

The piano is able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air.

- Kenneth R. Miller

topic: Mean, Piano, Air, Universal Truth, Piano Playing

Music is the universal language of mankind.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

topic: Music, Teacher, Appreciation, Music Life, Music Is Life

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

source: Jacques Barzun (1984). “Critical Questions: On Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940-1980”, p.54, University of Chicago Press

topic: Music, Names, Piano, Piano Playing, Piano Music

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

source: Lucille Kallen (1979). “Introducing C. B. Greenfield”, Crown Pub

topic: Running, Piano, Justice, Piano Playing

I insist on a Steinway for my recordings, my concerts and my home. It is the only piano I want to hear my music played on.

- Michel Legrand

topic: Home, Piano, Want, Steinway Piano, Piano Playing

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

- William Gaddis

topic: Player, Piano, Grandfather, Yes Or No, Binary

No other acoustic instrument can match the piano's expressive range, and no electric instrument can match its mystery.

- Kenneth R. Miller

topic: Piano, Acoustics, Mystery, Expressive, Piano Playing

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

topic: Music, Keys, Piano, Utensils, Piano Keys

Simplicity is the final achievement.

- Frederic Chopin

source: "If Not God, Then What? Neuroscience, Aesthetics, and the Origins of the Transcendent". Book by Joshua Fost (p. 93), November 16, 2007.

topic: Simplicity, Design, Achievement, Life Is Simple, Notes Music

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

topic: Music, Girl, Piano, Jazz Musician, Jazz Music

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

- Sandra Bullock

topic: Hands, Piano, Potatoes, Piano Playing

In college I had a weekend gig at a restaurant, a solo thing that was the best practice I could have ever had. That's where I learned to coordinate my singing and my piano playing.

- Norah Jones

topic: College, Weekend, Practice, Best Practices, Piano Playing

I got to sing solo in the junior choir when I was 10 or 11 and won a competition, and my sister's piano playing improved to a certain level. One time my sister and I worked together. The first song we ever sang in High School was Rags to Riches by Tony Bennett.

- Gordon Lightfoot

source: Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

topic: Song, School, Piano, Rags To Riches, Piano Playing

In terms of how the music developed, it was my normal process, which I would say is really a hybrid process of sketching on bits of paper, playing the piano, playing synthesisers, using the computer, staring out of the window, finding things I'd forgotten about, happy accidents, failed plans, best intentions, equipment failures. It is a multidimensional process incorporating a lot of planning and intention and a lot of randomness. Ultimately I just follow the material where it wants to go a lot of the time.

- Max Richter

topic: Piano, Normal, Happy Accidents, Piano Playing

I play piano all the time. I'm always at my piano, playing music.

- Brian Wilson

topic: Play, Piano, Playing Music, Piano Playing

In the last workshop I taught, a woman flew in from Thailand. She's a medical doctor in Bangkok. I asked her in her one-on-one session where she wanted photography to be in her life.Did she want a second career? Was it about earning money? Or was it art? And she said "None of those. I want photography to be serious in my life." It would be like someone wanting music, like piano playing, to be a richer, deeper, and maybe even harder experience.

- Sam Abell

source: Source: aphotoeditor.com

topic: Photography, Art, Doctors, Bangkok, Medical Doctor

You can't be different if you look at it. Being gifted is different. I had that in my piano playing. I'm very thankful for that. I'm very aware of that. The style and what I fed is just me. I never worked at it. It just happened.

- Nina Simone

source: Source: boscarol.com

topic: Piano, Style, Different, Piano Playing, Very Thankful

One encounters very capable fathers abashed by their piano-playing daughters. Three measures of Schumann make them red with embarrassment.

- Alfred Doblin

topic: Daughter, Father, Piano, Piano Playing, Schumann

Conducting has more to do with singing and breathing than with piano-playing.

- Colin Davis

source: "Sir Colin Davis obituary" by David Nice, www.theguardian.com. April 14, 2013.

topic: Breathing, Piano, Singing, Piano Playing

This world is not a platform where you will hear Thalberg-piano-playing. It is a piano manufactory, where are dust and shavings and boards, and saws and files and rasps and sandpapers. The perfect instrument and the music will be hereafter.

- Henry Ward Beecher

topic: Music, Dust, Piano, Piano Playing, Sandpaper

Piano playing is more difficult than statesmanship. It is harder to awake emotions in ivory keys than it is in human beings.

- Ignacy Jan Paderewski

topic: Inspirational, Keys, Ivory, Piano Playing

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

- Igor Stravinsky

topic: Relationship, Drama, Reading, Film Music, Living Room

Writing is like anything - baseball playing, piano playing, sewing, hammering nails. The more you work on it, the better you get. But it seems to take a longer time to get better at writing than hammering nails.

- Betsy Byars

topic: Baseball, Writing, Piano, Piano Playing, Playing Piano

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

source: "6 Questions With Alicia Keys". Billboard Interview, www.billboard.com. October 20, 2005.

topic: Song, Couple, Talking, Piano Playing

Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.

- Jon Bon Jovi

topic: Art, Emotional, Piano, Musical Experience, Piano Playing

I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.

- Anne Tyler

topic: Husband, Mean, Thinking, Typing, Piano Playing

Bud Powell's probably the biggest influence on my piano playing.

- Matthew Shipp

topic: Piano, Bud, Influence, Piano Playing