Piano Quotes - Page 6

My piano has not yet arrived. How did you send it? By Marseilles or by Perpignan? I dream music but I cannot make any because here there are not any pianos . . . in this respect this is a savage country.

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.

Slap some keys on her and we'll have a piano.

Figures tell us there are already more people on earth than we need to move even the heaviest piano.

I do not have a single white note on my piano; my elephant smoked too much.

First of all, I swore it was two people playing. When I finally admitted to myself that was one man, I gave up the piano for a month. I figured it was hopeless to practice.

Every time I see a piano, I have this urge to play it.

Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin-pot.

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

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.

I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work.

I draw and play the piano badly. But when I’m doing those things, I’m concentrating so hard there’s no room for worry. I find that onstage, too.

Everybody in my neighborhood in the '40s, they played pianos. That's how people partied. They didn't try the TV, the radio was OK, records was cool, but when people wanted to party, they got around a piano. My mother played piano, my sister played. I've been around a lot of piano all my life.

I always just sit down at the piano and make the main hook—what I want the track to be about melodically—and then I’ll build everything else around that. But growing up, I did not play any instruments.

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

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

The piano has been drinking, not me.

The more we sense...our ultimate potential, the more determined we become to achieve it. It's the difference between your mother hounding you to practice the piano and reaching the point where you want to do it yourself. You simply will not be denied the ultimate reward and the joy of the Big Finish. p 90

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.

I don't play accurately--any one can play accurately--but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.

My mother gave me a choice. She said, 'Would you like to take singing lessons or piano.' I'm glad I chose piano.

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.

I'm familiar to people. They feel comfortable with me. I started in live television. I perform live all the time. I sing with the piano. I sing with a symphony. I can sit and ask questions. I can listen. I'm very comfortable in most situations.