Top 100 Pianist Quotes
#1. It just so happens that my oldest and best friend is Bob James, the Grammy-winning great jazz pianist!
Jack O'Brien
#2. In Montreal, there is a friend of mine at school who is a jazz pianist with an amazing voice, and we sort of have this fusion/soul/R&B/folk music kind of thing. We've been keeping it low-key and opening for some friends.
Jake Epstein
#3. I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.
Rachel Corrie
#4. When I do operas, I'm not really singing very classically. I have a classical background as far as being a pianist and an oboist, but my voice isn't really classical in the operatic sense. But I certainly have a classical sensibility, so I'm comfortable being in that world.
Jason Graae
#5. I couldn't say I ever dreamt of becoming a composer, a pianist, or anything else for that matter. I have the kind of brain where nothing is set in stone.
Anthony Hopkins
#6. I have believed for many years that Oscar Peterson is not only the greatest pianist in jazz today, but the greatest it has ever known.
Gene Lees
#7. My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.
Amy Tan
#8. Allow some warm-up time each day to stimulate your creative flow. A pianist does keyboard exercises. A gymnast stretches. An artist needs to loosen up, too. It takes a few minutes to shift from the real world into a creative mode.
Nita Leland
#9. I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist.
Ottessa Moshfegh
#10. A young pianist & composer who has demonstrated an exceptional creativity, in both his playing & his writing, as well as showing us all, his very strong commitment & motivation to aim for high musical goals. Talent like his is rare.
Steve Lacy
#11. I've had to ban my mum from coming to see me play. She gets so nervous before any show. I've always got a few nerves but she's so much worse than me. You'd think she'd be able to handle that kind of situation. After all, she is a concert pianist.
Birdy
#13. My dad's family were political and he was always a theatrical creature, whereas my mum is really musical and her father was the touring pianist with Nat King Cole. My family was an explosive mixture of politics, religion and music - no wonder I turned out how I did.
Grace Jones
#14. I felt like a pianist who'd been forced to play on a few white keys in the middle, finally allowed to run his hands all up and down the keyboard.
Ann Brashares
#15. Originally I studied as a musician, a classical pianist. That was my career before I took up acting in my late 20s.
Christian McKay
#16. There's a pianist out of Boston who made a beautiful record for the Fresh Sound label called 'Sketch Book'; his name is Vardan Ovsepian
Brad Mehldau
#17. When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.
Steven Spielberg
#18. My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I'd spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the 'National Geographic.'
Joseph Murray
#19. I wanted to be a pianist but it just wasn't my thing. I guess I wanted to stand up rather than sit down.
Steve Lacy
#20. My mother was an opera singer and my grandmother a concert pianist, and they only liked classical music. If I put on a pop record, they would tell me to turn it off, so I only listen to classical.
Amanda Eliasch
#21. If you want to become a concert pianist, do it every day. You want to be a writer, do it every day. You want to become depressed, think depressing thoughts every day. You want to become an optimist, think a cheerful thought every day. Do it every day.
Robert Anton Wilson
#22. If you don't know Tom Lehrer, you should - in addition to being a classical pianist, mathematician, songwriter, satirist, researcher at Los Alamos and, he claims, inventor of the Jell-O shot, he is just delightfully funny and graceful.
Rachel Sklar
#23. Above the rush-hour din it was her ideal self she heard, the pianist she could never become, performing faultlessly Bach's second partita.
Ian McEwan
#24. When Hank Jones had his night off, I would get somebody to take my place as intermission pianist and I'd play the show with Ella, so I would get a chance to play with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith as well.
George Shearing
#25. I was much more interested in the orchestra than the piano, but I did become fairly proficient as a pianist and my teachers felt I had talent and wanted me to become a good concert pianist and earn my living that way.
Alan Hovhaness
#26. In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead.
David Amram
#27. Just as the pianist practices the most complicated pieces to improve the technique of his fingers, so too a grandmaster must keep his vision in trim by daily analysis of positions with sharp possibilities, and this applies whether he prefers such positions in his play or not.
Alexander Kotov
#28. I don't think I could have ever had a career as a pianist because I never ever wanted to play the notes the way they were written, I was too sloppy to learn them quite right.
Jerry Hunt
#29. Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person who drives a racing car not called a racist?
Steven Wright
#30. These hands are steady enough, but they are large. Had he been a proper pianist - he's dabbled inexpertly - his ten-note span might be of use.
Ian McEwan
#31. Real data is messy ... It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!
Tom Stoppard
#33. Newspapers ascribe the word "climber" to any person who falls in the mountains or off a rock. To refer to anyone who falls in the mountains as ... a climber ... is as factual as to say that anyone who sits down at a piano is a pianist.
Pat Ament
#34. My mother was a very talented pianist, and she was a music teacher who hated to teach music, actually, but she loved to play, so I was brought up with Chopin, Debussy and Mozart.
Peter C. Doherty
#36. The artist who gave me the most inspiration and direction, especially as a singer - and I absolutely consider myself a singer, 100 percent - is Nina Simone. She's my ultimate pianist-singer-type person.
Rufus Wainwright
#37. Oscar Peterson is my favorite all-around pianist. There are pianists I like because of one thing and pianists I like because of another. But overall, I like Oscar Peterson best.
Carmen McRae
#38. I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western.
Charles Kimbrough
#39. I decided during my teens that I wasn't going to have the life of a concert pianist, much to the chagrin of a lot of people who had put a lot of money into me!
Cy Coleman
#40. If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.
Stephen Sondheim
#41. Sometimes I think, not so much am I a pianist, but a vampire. All my life I have lived off the blood of Chopin.
Arthur Rubinstein
#42. There were two things I used to do to seduce girls: jokes and music. Since I'm not a great pianist, jokes were my thing.
Gad Elmaleh
#43. My body is an object of work. That's why I think to be an actor is one of the most violent jobs. If you're a pianist, you have your piano. If you're a guitarist, you have your guitar. But if you're a dancer, or you're an actor - your instrument is your body.
Monica Bellucci
#44. I am in love with a pianist, without his piano what is he?
Jai Clare
#45. At the age of 16, something happened with my finger and the doctor told me, you never can be a organist or pianist, so think about what you do with music.
Kurt Masur
#46. I've always been interested in both writing and music. When I first started getting published, I also worked as rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet, touring with them all over the U.S.A. and Europe - I wasn't making enough money from writing to support myself.
William Sleator
#47. We are governed by what you find in the bottom of dead beer glasses that whores have dunked their cigarettes in. The place has not even been swept out yet and they have an amateur pianist beating on the box
Ernest Hemingway,
#48. They wanted me to be a concert pianist, because I had a very good right hand, but my left hand's terrible and I hated performing.
Stephen Sondheim
#49. The zenith of virtuosity, a violinist like Jascha Heifetz, the supernatural in a pianist like Vladimir Horowitz, these are performers who were so idiosyncratic and personal that to imitate them would be like filling somebody else's bottle with your wine.
David Finckel
#50. Singers actually used to begin singing at a much younger age than they do now. I would say for me, I started late. But it's not unusual. I discovered I had a voice. I wanted to be a pianist when I was seven, and circumstances didn't allow that I studied it.
Dolora Zajick
#51. My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.
Dave Brubeck
#52. I played piano for a lot of my childhood and stupidly quit. I wish I hadn't - I could have been a great classical pianist!
Frankie Cosmos
#53. For the longest time, I wanted to become a pianist. That was kinda my thing.
Zedd
#54. I began ear training when I was about six months old. My mother was a concert pianist, and she started all of her children with music before they were a year old. Then she began to see that I had a musical gift.
Twyla Tharp
#55. Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music!
Dave Brubeck
#56. I heard a young black pianist. He was a teenager, I was eight years old, and he was playing boogie-woogie, and he just knocked me out. He thought he was alone in the old barn on the beat-up upright piano, but I was hiding in the corner so he wouldn't see me.
Mike Stoller
#57. I have been like a mediocre concert pianist playing in front of a tone-deaf family, who applaud out of duty rather than for accomplishment.
Chris Murray
#58. I wanted to be a concert pianist at Carnegie Hall; that is what I wanted to do from really early on.
Kirsten Nelson
#59. 'The Pianist' is a movie I could watch over and over again.
Vidal Sassoon
#60. If I had my life to live over, I wish I could be a great pianist or something.
Woody Allen
#61. It is not a profession to be a pianist and musician. It is a philosophy, a conception of life that cannot be based on good intentions or natural talent. First and foremost there must be a spirit of sacrifice.
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
#62. It's a pity to shoot the pianist when the piano is out of tune.
Rene Coty
#63. Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.
Maya Angelou
#64. The first jazz pianist I heard was Thelonious Monk. My father was listening to an album of his called 'Monk's Dream' almost every day from the time I was born.
Benny Green
#65. Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.
Nina Simone
#66. My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything.
Carly Simon
#67. I like Stevie Wonder as my favorite non-pianist pianist. I mean, I shouldn't call him a non-pianist, because he's really a great pianist, but he doesn't feature it that much - he uses his keyboards and his piano technique to support his great songs and so forth, but he can really blow.
Chick Corea
#68. To play the piano is to consort with nature. Every mollusk, galaxy, vapor or viper as well the sweet incense of love's distraction, is within the hands and grasp of the pianist.
Russell Sherman
#69. I'm lucky enough to be doing my dream job, but my second dream job would be to be a concert pianist.
Robert Emms
#70. I'm basically a cocktail jazz kind of pianist. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very good keyboard player. People think I think I'm good. I think I'm a very poor piano player.
Ray Manzarek
#71. Ask any great athlete or the concert pianist or the successful actor if they have arrived at the place where they need no further practice. They will tell you that the higher you climb in proficiency and public acceptance, the greater the need for practice.
Eric Butterworth
#72. My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.
Twyla Tharp
#73. Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
Anton Rubinstein
#74. My mom's a concert pianist, so she started teaching me when I was around seven. When I was eight, I started writing my own songs, and kinda started putting piano and singing together. But I'm trained classically, which is a big influence on me, I think.
Birdy
#75. Smugly on the other side of Kelly, our pianist, who'd opted
Tammara Webber
#76. My mother adores singing and plays piano. My uncle was a phenomenal pianist. My brother John is a double bassist. I used to play the piano, badly, and cello. My brother Peter played violin.
Fiona Shaw
#77. It's very hard to find a pianist that's willing to play the so-called accompanist role on part of the program and yet be capable of being a great solo pianist that you would want for the big sonatas.
Joshua Bell
#78. The pianist Cecil Taylor is extremely melodic; the guitarist Derek Bailey is extremely melodic, and Ornette Coleman.
Pat Metheny
#79. Many in Hollywood viewed the public persona of the young Debbie Reynolds as demure and vulnerable to be a complete facade. Pianist Oscar Levant once quipped, "She's as wistful as an iron factory."
Elizabeth Taylor
#80. Music informs my work so intensely. The better actor I become, the better pianist I become, and vice versa.
Janina Gavankar
#81. Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.
Carolyn See
#82. It seems that a lot of people, who haven't known of me as a pianist, think I've just started off as a comedian. And so for them the piano was something extra. But, of course, playing the piano was something that came before all of what's happened now.
Dudley Moore
#83. I actually think that many of the musicians who have something meaningful to say don't win competitions. An incredible pianist like Horowitz had so much to say, but he might not win anything in competition because of his wrong notes.
Charlie Albright
#84. Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.
Michael Levine
#85. I don't think I'm even close to fulfilling my potential. And I think also that, unlike a pianist or a flutist, an actor has an instrument that is constantly changing.
Kerry Washington
#86. When a pianist sits down and does a virtuoso performance he is in a technical sense transmitting more information to a machine than any other human activity involving machinery allows.
Robert Moog
#87. Investing in a startup does not make you an entrepreneur any more than buying a grand piano makes you a concert pianist.
Jeffrey Fry
#88. If you can't get a job as a pianist in a brothel you become a royal reporter.
Max Hastings
#90. When a little more than a teenager, I was a piano-bar pianist in the land where I was born and raised, Tuscany.
Andrea Bocelli
#91. Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.
Nat Wolff
#92. My mother was a classical pianist and my stepfather was an industrialist who was passionate about composing contemporary music.
Carla Bruni
#93. I don't regard myself as a great classical or jazz pianist. I like country music, but I'm not a great player. I just like music. Drums 'n' bass is pretty exciting and I'd love to explore it.
Keith Emerson
#94. Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, Berg imply a type of pianist who is intellectual. That's not always associated with female soloists.
Jeffrey Tate
#95. I would have given my right arm to have been a pianist.
Bobby Robson
#96. Classical pianist Awadagin Pratt. I first heard this eccentric and introverted performer when I was living in the Midwest. He was playing Brahms ballades - haunting.
Daniel Breaker
#97. I've loved musical theater ever since I was a kid. My mother's a pianist, and my grandfather was an amateur theater director and stand-up comic. And I was an only child. And I loved attention. So from an early age, my family was teaching old musical songs.
Rachel Bloom
#98. The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.
Ayn Rand
#99. You cannot play the piano by telling a pianist what to do, go a little more to the left or to the right. And the same is for the computer, really. You have to play yourself to get the most out of it.
Massimo Vignelli
