"There are no wrong notes." -- Thelonious Monk

"I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to." -- Elvis Presley

"When a piece gets difficult, make faces." -- Arthur Schnabel (to Vladimir Horowitz)

"Go get a real estate license." -- Frank Zappa

"All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff." -- Frank Zappa

"I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?" -- Frank Zappa (in response to Tipper Gore's allegations that music incites people or influences their behavior in general)

"There is two kinds of music, the good and bad. I play the good kind." -- Louis Armstrong

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Company rejecting the Beatles, 1962

"If you have to ask, you'll never know." --Miles Davis' answer to the question, "What is Jazz?"

"An ambitious and aggressive mother conned pianist Arthur Rubinstein into listening to her 10-year-old son murder a nocturne by Chopin. At the conclusion of the massacre, Rubinstein announced, 'Madam, that is undoubtedly the worst piano playing I ever heard.' Whereupon the mother nodded happily and told her son, 'You see, stupid? Now will you give up those expensive piano lessons and try out for the Little League baseball team?'" -- Art Buchwald

"The piano has been drinking, not me." -- Tom Waits

"Hope you don't think this is Billy Joel unplugged. I'm a piano player. I'm already unplugged." -- Billy Joel

"A rock band used to be four guys and a drummer. Now it's five guys sitting around reading manuals!" --Bill Bruford

"I'm told that Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds." -- Mark Twain

"I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'."  -- Bob Newhart

"Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune."  -- Kin Hubbard

"Music is higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy."  -- Ludwig Van Beethoven

"Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth."  -- Ludwig Van Beethoven

"If music be the food of love, play on."  -- William Shakespeare

"If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together."  -- Richard M. Nixon

"Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is 8 or 9 he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes."  -- Bill Cosby

"Music hath the charm to sooth the savage beast (sic), but I'd try a revolver first."  -- Josh Billings

"The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't seen the joke yet."  -- Oliver Herford

"...I don't want you to play me a riff that's going to impress Joe Satriani; give me a riff that makes a kid want to go out and buy a guitar and learn to play."  -- Ozzy Osbourne

"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."  -- Oscar Levant

"Music is spiritual. The music business is not." -- Van Morrison

"Music is everybody's possession. Only publishers think that people own it." -- John Lennon

"Composers shouldn't think too much--it interferes with their plagiarism."  -- Howard Dietz

"My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer." -- Cole Porter

"Get up from that piano. You hurtin' its feelings." -- Jelly Roll Morton

"I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us." -- Martin Luther

"There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." -- Albert Schweitzer

"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major." --Sergei Prokofiev

"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve." -- Xavier Cugat

"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." -- Harry S Truman

"I always make sure that the lid over the keyboard is open before I start to play." -- Artur Schnabel, Australian pianist, asked the secret of piano playing.

"I love Beethoven, especially the poems." -- Ringo Starr

"You don't need any brains to listen to music." -- Luciano Pavarotti

"You know, it's funny... when you're making money, people don't think you're playing jazz. Now when you're not making money, people think that you're a good jazz musician." -- Pete Fountain

"It's really hard to make a living as a musician. It's almost impossible." -- Billy Joel

"I knew nothing of the real life of a musician, but I seemed to see myself standing in front of great crowds of people, playing my accordion." -- Lawrence Welk

"When I auditioned for my high school band the band director was excited because my father was known to be a great musician. When he heard me, he said 'Are you sure you're Ellis's son?'" -- Wynton Marsalis

"I'm a musician at heart, I know I'm not really a singer. I couldn't compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it." -- Nat King Cole

"I think one of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport." -- Jon Anderson

"Aunt Marion was right... Never marry a musician, and never answer the door." -- Charles M. Schulz

"I grew up wanting to be a musician, but my parents were sure I would starve to death. So, they put me in physics and chemistry. That eventually blew up, and I got into radio." -- John Tesh

"Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music." -- Gioacchini Antonio Rossini

"An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger." --Dan Rather

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end." -- Igor Stravinsky

"A good composer does not imitate; he steals." -- Igor Stravinsky

"Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes." -- Bill Cosby

"Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled." -- George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright and music critic.

"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living." -- Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer

"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!" -- Gioacchino Rossini

"In opera, there is always too much singing." -- Claude Debussy

"Country music is three chords and the truth." -- Harlan Howard

"Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already." -- Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.

"As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note. " -- Georges Bizet

"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself." -- Johann Sebastian Bach

"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung." --Voltaire (1694-1778)

"Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best." -- Henry Van Dyke

"Piano: A cumbersome piece of furniture found in many homes, where playing it ensures the early departure of unwanted guests."
-- David W. Barber, The Musician's Dictionary.

"Piano. n. A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience." -- Ambrose Bierce, American journalist, The Devil's Dictionary.

It is not always possible to predict the response of a doting Jewish mother. Witness the occasion on which the late piano virtuoso Oscar Levant telephoned his mother with some important news. He had proposed to his beloved and been accepted. Replied Mother Levant: 揋ood, Oscar, I抦 happy to hear it. But did you practice today??/font>

"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left" -- Oscar Levant

"You're talking to someone who really understands rock music." -- Tipper Gore

"Down South where I come from, you don't go round hittin' too many white keys." -- Eubie Blake, African-American pianist and composer, when asked why he wrote so many of his compositions in difficult keys, with many flats or many sharps.