Quotes About Pianos

#1. 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

#2. When I was at school, I wanted to play a piano, and they said, 'No, that's for the classical students.' There's always been this air around pianos, which can very often discourage a young person from having a go.

Jamie Cullum

#3. It was a very odd household, because the grandmothers were so different. Both of them had their own pianos. So it would be duelling pianos by grandmothers.

Diane Cilento

#4. I was brought up west southwest coast of Scotland and my mother and father had a music shop, and so I was surrounded by pianos and drums and guitars, and music, of course.

Colin Hay

#5. After the Second World War, I returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud, who wrote wonderful works like 'Le Boeuf sur le Toit' and 'La Cretion du Monde.' I especially enjoy his work for two pianos, 'Scaramouche.'

Dave Brubeck

#6. I heard what I'd learned against my will to identify as new age music. Aimless and spacey, it meandered from unresolved keyboard chord to unresolved keyboard chord with some somnolent noodling in place of melody. Drooling pianos, music to sleepwalk by.

Timothy Hallinan

#7. In prayer, something like an echo takes place. When you strike a note on the piano, corresponding strings in all the other pianos in the room start to vibrate. It is just the same when we express a pure wish in our ardent prayers: all around us we mobilize angels who are inspired by the same wish.

Richard Wurmbrand

#8. Do broken pianos play broken songs? Do they have busted melodies for busted hearts? Is there a song living inside it that's waiting to get out? Her keys are shattered and her notes long since silent but I can still hear her song. Just listen, just listen.

Tyler Knott Gregson

#9. The Steinway pianos of today are the finest I have ever played.

James Levine

#10. Steinway grand pianos are the best in the world.

Maurizio Pollini

#11. Are still men, and not keyboards of pianos over which the hands of Nature may play at their own sweet will. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letters from the Underworld

Eugene H. Peterson

#12. I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you'd see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.

Brian McKnight

#13. I worship pianos like they are prize diamonds, and I never willfully do damage to them. But I grew up playing guitars, and you treat a guitar like a best friend or a little brother or a lover you have a tempestuous relationship with.

Jamie Cullum

#14. Baldwin is sort of getting to be a bit funny. I don't know what happened, but a few years ago they suddenly went bankrupt and Gibson bought the whole outfit. Since then they haven't seemed to be doing an awfully good job of providing pianos.

Marian McPartland

#15. Girls are like pianos. When they're not upright, they're grand.

Benny Hill

#16. I loved grand pianos and small pianos, too.

Alicia Keys

#17. A trumpet sounds pretty much like a trumpet, and that's true of a lot instruments; pianos sound like pianos, but there's something about the guitar - the range of possibilities is much broader.

The Edge

#18. England is a country of pianos, they are everywhere.

Frederic Chopin

#19. Pianos should never go out of tune. The true sin is something different than what we've been taught; the true sin is living so far removed from absolute harmony. That is more powerful than the truths and lies we tell every day. I

Paulo Coelho

#20. (Referring to the piano's natural shape) Isn't it a shame when those big fat opera singers lean against the pianos and bend them?

Victor Borge

#21. Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it's more exhausting than lifting pianos.

Steve Toltz

#22. The family story tells, and it was told true,
of my great-grandfather who begat eight
genius children and bought twelve almost new
grand pianos. He left a considerable estate
when he died.

Anne Sexton

#23. It is a privilege and an honor to perform on Steinway pianos.

Diana Krall

#24. Usually I can hear the pianos, the saxophone, and usually I can hear Ronnie. But I really need to listen to Keith and Mick. The rest of the band is sort of an embellishment to that.

Charlie Watts

#25. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?

Milan Kundera

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

Tori Amos

#27. I think it would be better if nobody owned anything, but they didn't starve. Had enough paint and enough pianos and everything else.

Arthur Boyd

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

Victor Borge

#29. 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.

Victor Borge

#30. I really wanted to find a piano for the farm house. There were so many free pianos on Craigslist, I thought, 'Let's get as many free pianos as we can and stick them all in the barn.' I got eight in a short period of time, only six of which were tunable, but it's still quite funny.

Neko Case

#31. The piano is just a different animal. It's expensive, it's big, it's heavy, and it doesn't fit in the mix easily. Everyone grew up with a piano in their living room, so rocking out on the piano was accessible - it wasn't an upper-class thing. Now pianos have become very much a piece of furniture.

Ben Folds

#32. Our daily life is filled with electronic pianos, ring tones, the disembodied voice giving you your bank balance over the telephone. Even silence can be electronic, courtesy of sound-canceling headphones.

Serge Schmemann

#33. Marriages are like pianos. They go in and out of tune.

Sarah Waters

#34. Pianos tend to get better as they age, the more you play them. They grow into their sound.

Alicia Witt

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

Edith Sitwell

#36. 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.

Frederic Chopin

#37. People aren't pianos. You don't hit a certain note and know what you're going to get.

Gwendolyn Heasley

#38. You know that, according to quantum theory, if two particles collide with enough energy you can, in principle, with an infinitesimal probability, produce two grand pianos.

Isidor Isaac Rabi

#39. I wish to thank Steinway for its wonderful pianos which I've been privileged to play in all my concerts. There is no piano like it in the world.

Evgeny Kissin

#40. I guess you go too far when pianos try to be guitars.

Tori Amos

#41. I've paid for more pianos in hotel lobbies than you can imagine.

Kid Rock

#42. I can sit down and vomit on the
keys
but it's my
vomit.
it's better than sitting in a room
with 3 or 4 people and
their pianos.
this is my piano
and it is better than theirs.

Charles Bukowski

#43. 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.

Dr. John

#44. He should have known it was all wrong the moment they started hanging grand pianos over the sea-monster pool in the atrium.

Douglas Adams

#45. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

W. H. Auden

#46. I'm a guitarist by background. That's what I used to do for sessions when I was younger and that sort of thing. We have several pianos in the house and I tend to just sit and fiddle around.

Steven Price

#47. It's dark. You exhale a fist of memory. I love you like weathering wood in a room of empty pianos. When you return to something you love, it's already beyond repair. You wear it broken.

James L. White

#48. I've had grand pianos that are more expensive than, like, a year's worth of rent.

Lady Gaga

#49. I have long admired Steinway pianos for their qualities of tone, clarity, pitch consistency, touch responsiveness, and superior craftsmanship.

Billy Joel

#50. So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.

Tony Hoagland

#51. If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music.

Lee Ritenour

#52. Plus, there were so many pianos in my house, so I couldn't really avoid it.

Vanessa Carlton

#53. 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.

Theodore E. Steinway

#54. My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion ...

Jeanette Winterson

#55. Well, my piano's really beautiful. I actually have two pianos. I have a Yamaha upright from the '60s that's blond, wood, and black, and I also have one from the '20s from Chicago - not a well-known brand or anything.

Zooey Deschanel

#56. For the piano and me it is always a blind date! I meet different pianos every single day. I can't take my piano with me like a bassist can take his instrument. So whenever I arrive I am a bit nervous to see what kind of piano is waiting for me.

Hiromi

#57. In Canada pianos needed water. You opened up the back and left a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty. Her father had told her about the dwarfs who drank only at pianos, never in bars.

Michael Ondaatje

#58. I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they're a necessity. When I'm playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected - to my music.

Rafael Vinoly