The Pianist Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Right at the beginning, before the pianist could get her wheels up and fly into that storm, she was hit with a con brio, which I figured meant she had to play either with brightness, with coldness, or with cheese.

Richard Bach

#4. In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'

Oscar Wilde

#5. It's all very well having a great pianist playing but it's no good if you haven't got anyone to get the piano on the stage in the first place, otherwise the pianist would be standing there with no bloody piano to play.

Ian Holloway

#6. He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#7. Some experience is helpful. "The Pianist" was a film that I could make with my eyes closed because I had lived it and everything was still alive in me.

Roman Polanski

#8. A general air of surprise and genuine satisfaction fell upon everyone as they saw the pianist enter.

Kate Chopin

#9. Steinway is the only piano on which the pianist can do everything he wants. And everything he dreams.

Vladimir Ashkenazy

#10. The pianist Cecil Taylor is extremely melodic; the guitarist Derek Bailey is extremely melodic, and Ornette Coleman.

Pat Metheny

#11. 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

#12. It's a pity to shoot the pianist when the piano is out of tune.

Rene Coty

#13. 'The Pianist' is a movie I could watch over and over again.

Vidal Sassoon

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. The people who raised me musically are my mother, who is a classically trained pianist, and my stepfather.

Jeff Buckley

#17. Smugly on the other side of Kelly, our pianist, who'd opted

Tammara Webber

#18. There's a difference between doing something and being something, but they merge into each other. I mean, you play the piano a bit, and then more and more, and at some point you become a pianist. That's who you are.

Nicci French

#19. I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.

Donald Fagen

#20. Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

Roberta Flack

#21. I'm sorry that I did not become the world's first black classic pianist. I think I would have been happier.

Nina Simone

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Music informs my work so intensely. The better actor I become, the better pianist I become, and vice versa.

Janina Gavankar

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. Arin. I've wanted to do this for a long time."
Her words silenced him, steadied him.
Antecipation lifted within her like the fragance of a garden under the rain. She sat at the piano, touching the keys. "Ready?"
He smiled. "Play.

Marie Rutkoski

#34. There is a kind of classlessness in the theater. The rehearsal pianist, the head carpenter, the stage manager, the star of the show-all are family.

John Kander

#35. A great pianist doesn't run around the piano or do push ups with his fingers. To be great, he plays the piano ... being a footballer is not about running, push-ups or physical work generally. The best way to be a great footballer is to play.

Jose Mourinho

#36. If you lock me in the room with a piano teacher for a year I might be able to knock out a rendition of 'Roll Out The Barrel,' but will I ever be a concert pianist? No.

Alan Sugar

#37. Jazz has a strong following in certain circles and there are annual jazz festivals in Puerto Plata and at Casa de Teatro in the capital. Grammy-winning Dominican jazz pianist Michael Camilo has had success on a global level. The classical music and ballet

Ginnie Bedggood

#38. When I was first starting out as a kid, I tried to pad my resume with everything I had ever done - ice-skate, carry a tune. I can't dance for my life, but I can learn, so I'll tell people I can dance. I play the piano - I'm a really good pianist, actually.

Alexandra Daddario

#39. When I hear the words jazz pianist, that just means I have the skills to do most things. Because to be a jazz pianist, even to be a bad jazz pianist, you have to be pretty good.

Robert Glasper

#40. I'm a concert pianist, that's a pretentious way of saying I'm unemployed at the moment.

Oscar Levant

#41. What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

Kurt Vonnegut

#42. The game of cricket existed long before I was born. It will be played centuries after my demise. During my career I was privileged to give the public my interpretation of its character in the same way that a pianist might interpret the works of Beethoven.

Donald Bradman

#43. The collective conscience of a hundred musicians is no light burden. Think for a moment of what it would mean to a pianist if by some miracle every key of his instrument should suddenly become a living thing.

Charles Munch

#44. I ... started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that's just the way it came out.

Nat King Cole

#45. Frankie Randall is a consummate performer. He is an exquisite jazz pianist and wonderful singer. I had the great pleasure to work with him on the Dean Martin Show and I'm very proud to call him a friend!

Lainie Kazan

#46. Miss Petrowska,an excellent pianist, held the audience transfixed with Chou Wen-chung's work. Miss Petrowska was coolness itself in getting the hardware into the piano and out again ... in Messiaen, a feeling for the music's reverent sobriety combined to produce an absorbing performance.

Donal Henahan

#47. And most of the time, when you're young and dumb - you know everything! Charles Freeman Lee bebop pianist and trumpeter

Annette Johnson

#48. When I was studying ... there weren't any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.

Nina Simone

#49. I sat on the piano bench next to my mother in church. Something happened before I set foot on this planet. I was crawling around inside of her. She was a church pianist. My dad was a brilliant singer. I was hearing it.

Al Jarreau

#50. I was like a well trained pianist who knows which note to hit, but can't make the music his own.

David Benioff

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. It just so happens that my oldest and best friend is Bob James, the Grammy-winning great jazz pianist!

Jack O'Brien

#69. 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,

#70. 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

#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. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. For the longest time, I wanted to become a pianist. That was kinda my thing.

Zedd

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. I told him what I thought and he suddenly leapt into the air with joy, like a child: 'Also, wirklich, gut?' [So it was really good?]. Such a titan, and so unsure of himself.

Sviatoslav Richter

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. 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