Player Piano Quotes

#1. A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording.

Charles Petzold

#2. 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

#3. My dad was a self-taught stride piano player. The myth is - I don't whether it's true or not - that he taught himself to play by watching a player piano.

Mose Allison

#4. 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

#5. When we'd gone to Disneyland, the tree house had been my favorite thing in the whole park. If only I'd had no parents watching my every move, if only I'd been a happy, carefree orphan, I'd have hidden under the player piano until everything closed, and then taken up residence there.

Karen Joy Fowler

#6. Vonnegut's earliest novels hint strongly at his familiarity with Wiener's work, The Human Use of Human Beings, especially his first novel, Player Piano (1952), which shows his concern for the social implications of automation, the replacement of human beings with machines.

David Porush

#7. I'd like to be a piano player.

Chris Daughtry

#8. Most of my music theory knowledge is based on piano. But I write on guitar a lot, too. I'm not a great guitar player by any means. I'm not a great instrumentalist. I play piano on stage. I don't play guitar on stage, but I use it to write quite a lot.

Zooey Deschanel

#9. I cut the scene out, but there was a moment where Christoph Waltz plays the piano in 'Django [Unchained]' - Jamie [Foxx] is a magnificent piano-player but there's never a moment where Django plays the piano.

Quentin Tarantino

#10. I had been inspired by an organ player named Earl Grant, who played organ and piano together. My mom took me to see him. So I went home, put my piano and organ together, too.

Billy Preston

#11. I was a piano player. I love piano playing. I just love all music.

Maceo Parker

#12. On the subject of Egypt, Ellen Cherry was so vague she thought Ramses II was a jazz piano player. From that, we might conclude that she was equally dumb about jazz.

Tom Robbins

#13. I had no idea what those cords were in the bridge of 'Prisoner In Disguise' when I wrote them. I had to go over to Don Gorman, the piano player, and ask what in the world I was playing.

J. D. Souther

#14. Louis Armstrong changed all the brass players around, but after Bird, all of the instruments had to change - drums, piano, bass, trombones, trumpets, saxophones, everything.

Cootie Williams

#15. I love my music, so I want to produce, write, and serve my music. I've had to learn about EQ frequencies and programming and space and clutter and how to be a better piano or bass player - everything.

FKA Twigs

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

Pierre Danos

#17. We're gonna release a studio album probably a year from now and we've got these recordings that we did with Coco Taylor and Johnny Johnson, who was Chuck Berry's piano player.

James Young

#18. I believe I inherited my sense of music from my father. My father was an ear piano player; he could just hear something and play it.

Richie Havens

#19. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet.

J.D. Salinger

#20. My life has been guided by an unseen piano player, who is actually typing this now.

John Lennon

#21. Bob Erlendson, a local piano player, taught me chord structure and which scales go along with them. Later, I began listening to [pianists] Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner. Then I got interested in [saxophonist] John Coltrane.

Lenny Breau

#22. I think I'm a very poor piano player.

Ray Manzarek

#23. The piano is a divinely inspired instrument, a mirror held up to its player's soul that captures the light and shadow of the performer and reflects them back to the listener.

David Lanz

#24. I'm not particularly good at anything. I'm not an incredible guitarist or piano player or songwriter. I think what I do is, when I notice someone is really good at something, I try to get that out of them.

Benny Blanco

#25. I don't like the piano player music of the movies, the Michael Nyman, and sometimes that piano music makes me puke. It's not really romantic. It's just trying to get your Pavlovian juices flowing because it's a technique now.

Charlemagne Palestine

#26. And I've played piano since I was little, so I was originally the piano player in the band.

Caroline Corr

#27. He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a danger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returning owners opened up pianos and lost their hands.

Michael Ondaatje

#28. I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn't think I'd be quite good enough to be a soloist, but I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could work as a player, a teacher.

John Williams

#29. I've never felt anything that moves me as much as my piano. I'm an emotional player. I don't really like people. I prefer my piano to people. It's totally reliable and it's alive. I can hear what it's saying.

Tori Amos

#30. I can play piano, and I write everything on piano, but I don't really feel like a piano player, necessarily.

Lia Ices

#31. I would just hear piano players and I would hear music, and just think - I don't just want to sit here and passively listen; I want to get inside it.

Hugh Laurie

#32. 11. I am inclined to say: I 'point' in different senses to this body, to its shape, to its colour, etc.
What does that mean?
What does it mean to say I 'hear' in a different sense the piano, its sound, the piece, the player, his fluency? I 'marry', in one sense a woman, in another her money.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#33. I know a flute player is technically called a "flautist," but something about it sounds a little sketchy, as does "pianist," so I will refrain.

Julie Halpern

#34. Bad guys turned informer. Good guys didn't - no matter when, no matter what.

Kurt Vonnegut

#35. The mark of genius is consistency. Do we hear of naive genius piano players? If anyone knows of one, try listening to it for an hour.

David Luiz

#36. I always thought of myself as the piano player in the band. That, I suppose, I'm confident about, and I guess my songwriting developed as I went along and I got a certain amount of confidence in that. The songs are like my kids, I'm proud of all of them for one reason or another.

Billy Joel

#37. My brother Carl taught me how to play bass. I'm a self-taught keyboard player, though - I figured out our harmonies at the piano.

Brian Wilson

#38. 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

#39. I'm not a great piano player.

Norah Jones

#40. I'm not an overly skilled piano player or organ player at all, but I think I'm the right piano and organ player for the Heartbreakers. And I've been the right piano and organ player for a lot of sessions that I've been called on.

Benmont Tench

#41. One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.

Robert Hughes

#42. Hope you don't think this is Billy Joel unplugged. I'm a piano player. I'm already unplugged.

Billy Joel

#43. He's a seminal force, a guru, an original creator of the New Orleans piano style.. the teacher of great players like Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, Mac Rebenack, James Booker, and Huey Smith. All acknowledge him as The Great Master.

Jerry Wexler

#44. I'm a piano player. I never thought of myself as a singer, at all. I was always trying to sound like somebody else. I don't like my own voice, I like Ray Charles, Robert Plant, I like Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, people that have an edge in their voice.

Billy Joel

#45. I was a piano player before I was a poet.

Gil Scott-Heron

#46. I've found that since I've been playing the acoustic, listening to a horn player has left me thinking, well, what can I do with that? But somehow piano players, I feel more of a connection to , now that I'm using the acoustic.

Bill Orcutt

#47. I'm not everybody's cup of tea. But sometimes criticism can be hurtful. Be respectful. I'm a good piano player, I can sing well, I write good songs. If you don't like it, fair enough. But give me a break.

Elton John

#48. He remembered his cry of the night before: We must meet in the middle of the Bridge!

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Harry Truman

#50. I grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players and arrangers and composers; I came to playing in a band from the perspective of someone who never expected to play guitar in a band.

Daniel Rossen

#51. I think I'm a songwriter. I grab an instrument to make my body a song, but I'm not a player as such, maybe a little more on guitar, but certainly not piano.

P.J. Harvey

#52. 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

#53. When Seymour saw me seated at the piano at that first rehearsal, he shouted: 'What's that kid doing here? Call your piano player and let's get started.'

Mary Lou Williams

#54. A female piano player is always pretty cool to me.

Chrisette Michele

#55. If I had spent a quarter of the time that I spent manipulating my sexuality in front of a piano instead, I would be the most gifted piano player of my lifetime.

Ricky Martin

#56. My wife is a classically trained piano player, and she also orchestrates.

Atticus Ross

#57. The first reason why I started to use the [electric] keyboard is because I really like the bending sound of the guitar and bass player. I can't bend the piano sound. I really like the feel behind it. I feel it adds flavour and character to my music.

Hiromi

#58. My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.

Anne Waldman

#59. In high school, I was always into Jerry Lee Lewis, and they decided they needed a piano player for the jazz band. I had my little boogie-woogie thing that I did, so I did my little boogie-woogie thing. I had a very high-pitched voice.

Nellie McKay

#60. Don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player!

Elton John

#61. 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

#62. I've watched other people singing, I've become a much better singer. I've become a singer that plays the piano instead of a piano player that sings.

Elton John

#63. 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