Piano Quotes

‘T is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine stump.

My piano is to me what his boat is to the seaman, what his horse is to the Arab: nay more, it has been till now my eye, my speech, my life. Its strings have vibrated under my passions, and its yielding keys have obeyed my every caprice.

If a string went (on my guitar) we’d take it out of the piano. And it worked great. We’d find an ‘A’ string and get the pliers out when the fellow wasn’t looking.

Piano playing is more difficult than statesmanship. It is harder to awake emotions in ivory keys than it is in human beings.

Fan: I’d give my life to be able to play like that! Paderewski: I did.

Without the piano one cannot invent new harmonies. (scolding a music student, Ralph Vaughan Williams, for working in a hotel room with no piano.)

The pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments: its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry.

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consists in nothing more than the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

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.

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.