My goal was to play drums, but my father made me take piano lessons. He told me I needed to learn to read music first, so I took lessons for six years. I thank God that he made me take those lessons, because it taught me a tremendous amount.
My entire life, I've always known that I wanted to be a performer, but I didn't know exactly how, where or when. I never learned or studied the craft, formally. I grew up doing martial arts and playing piano. But, something inside of me always said t...
I suffered a bout of depression that pushed me to reevalute things in my life, and I learned a lot about myself and the world and my spirituality. I sat at a piano, and the ideas fell into my head. I started playing, and I felt comfortable with my mu...
When I was first starting out, you'd have to bang an old upright piano and stick a mike in it and it would always feed back and you could never turn it up loud enough to be heard and I would beat my hands black and blue and bloody.
If you play the guitar, you've got to hold the chords down with one hand while you play with the other, so you're limited to one hand. But the piano is the king of instruments because you have your 10 fingers, which become the 10 members of the orche...
I just go into the studio, look at the lyrics for the first time when I put them on the piano, and go. If I haven't got it within 40 minutes, I give up. It's never changed, the thrill has never gone, because I don't know what I'm going to get next.
I was very depressed when I was 19... I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to...
Sorren: What the hell have you got in there, a piano? Sedgewick: Oh, that's very funny, mate. Sorren: Sedgewick, you won't get this thing through. Sedgewick: [pulling his trunk into the tunnel] I'll cope!
Soap: Where the fuck are they going?... Shift a piano? I thought this was meant to be a robbery. Eddie: Where did they get those outfits? Tom, Bacon: Not a bad idea, that.
George Banks: I suggest you have this piano repaired. When I sit down to an instrument, I like to have it in tune. Mrs. Banks: But, George, you don't play. George Banks: Madam, that is entirely beside the point!
Max: Holy shit! Noodles! Noodles! Come here, come here. Look, the blond by the piano... [points at Carol] Noodles: Who's that? Max: Who is that? You and this broad were practically engaged at one point!
Flora: She says no. She says she'd rather be boiled alive by natives than get back on your stinkin' tub. Head Seaman: You be damn fortuned I don't smack your puppy gob, young missy. Damn lucky!
[Donald and Daffy are playing "Hungarian Rhapsody #2" in a session of dueling pianos] Donald F. Duck: Hey, hey! Cut it out! Daffy Duck: Doeth anybody underthtand what thith duck ith thaying?
Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demandin...
People don't understand what music really is. I've been a musician since I was 6 years old. I got my first piano, was playing recitals at 8, 10 I picked up a guitar, 12 I picked up my first Pearl Master drum set. I was an artist before I was an 'arti...
I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian ...
My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit...
I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.
I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.
If I sit down with an electric guitar, what's going to come out are Sabbath/Zeppelin type riffs, but if I'm sitting behind a piano late at night, I might write something like 'Desperado.' You're not going to write 'Desperado' between a wall of Marsha...
If you're going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you've got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you'll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won't sound good to those who know piano - or to yourself.
