piano quotes

  • Piano, n. A parlour utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.

    - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
      The Cynic's Word Book. Retitled  The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

  • Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.

    - Charles Bukowski
      Title of book.

  • The piano is a percussion instrument, like a drum.You don't struma piano.Youdon't bowa piano.You bang and strike a piano.You beat the shit out of a piano.

    - Billy Joel
      Rolling Stone,15  Apr.

  • Ingeneral, therefore, color isa means ofexerting a direct influenceuponthesoul.Coloristhekeyboard.The eyeis the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.

    -Wassily Kandinsky
    Quoted in K C Lindsay and P  Vergo (eds and trans) Kandinsky: Complete Writings on  Art (1982).

  • Dire au peintre qu'il faut prendre la nature comme elle est, vaut de dire au virtuose qu'il peut s'asseoir sur le piano. Telling a painter that he must take nature as it is is like telling a virtuoso that he can sit on the piano.

    - Ste  phane Mallarme 
      Le 'ten o'clock'de M. Whistler.

  • A colossal bore† I feel I could write something like it tomorrow, if my cat inspired me by walking over the piano. See Gounod 365:26.

    - Prosper Me  rime  e
    Of  Wagner's opera Tannha«  user, after the disastrous premi e' re of its revised version at the Paris Ope  ra,13 Mar. Quoted in  Joanna Richardson La Vie Parisienne (1971), p.262.

  •   What are we learning Frenchor thepianofor,Iwould like to know, if it is not to be sold to a man some day† We have to cringe, and manoeuvre, and grimace for a husbanda husband who may be deaf orhavea hump if he is richa husband that may attack you in delirium tremens to-day if he makes a devout act of contrition for it to-morrow.

    -William O'Brien
      When We Were Boys.

  • 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 (Abbott) McNeill Whistler
      The GentleArt of Making Enemies.

  • Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
      Impressions of America: Leadville.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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