Quotes About Music

I believe in professionalism, but playing is not like a job. You have to be grateful to have the opportunity to play.

I've been playing music professionally, full time since 1980 when I graduated college at the age of 22.

There's this thing where Asian parents force you to play an instrument at an early age, but god forbid you like it and want to pursue it professionally! But, as a kid, I never did choir, and didn't sing.

I went to national piano competitions and did that whole circuit. Then I played professionally to support myself when I moved out to LA.

Music will always be my No. 1 passion, but I don't have to be doing it professionally. It's not really about that for me anymore. I feel like I don't have to look at it as a career. I can just rest in it and just be.

I left rock and roll professionally at about 49. That's too long as far as I'm concerned. Some people can do it; it depends on what you were.

Professionally, I want to keep playing music; I can't escape that.

I decided to start professionally making music at about 11. I was like, 'Okay, this is something I really want to do.'

Professionally, I did a couple of operas when I was in school, when I was 18.

Nobody in my family plays music professionally, but I definitely grew up around the culture of when my parents got together, as well as a lot of eating and drinking going on, they would also sing - they sat around in a circle, and everyone had a party piece.

I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent, to be able to play the piano professionally.

It is completely a God thing that I am here today because for the first 17 years of my life, I never thought I would ever do music professionally. I'd always liked what my dad did, but I never thought that I wanted to do it, just to be different.

I didn't think it would be possible for me to do music professionally. I was afraid to speak up and say I wanted to become a musician.

I started to sing professionally when I was about 13 or 14.

I'm a big fan of live music and going to gigs, but I'll leave it to the professionals.

People still call me the eternal amateur. After all, professionals are supposed to be able to conduct everything. But I can't unless I feel some connection inside. Conducting is not an end in itself for me.

I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.

I think me and Kristen Bell are going to start a band. It's called Kung-Fu Professor.

My parents met in music school, and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing.

I was a theater major, and I remember being in college, and whenever my professor would assign me songs that I hated, I really had a hard time singing them. One time, I even faked sick so I wouldn't have to sing a song.

Piano was my first instrument, but it wasn't the instrument that I showed the most proficiency on.

I've always felt a great affinity with music. I've felt myself to be more of a musician than anything else, though I'm not proficient in any one instrument. But I think I have a musical sense of things... and writing seems to me to be a musical experience - rhythmically and in many other ways.

Yeah, once the song is written, it just complexifies the profile of it to have the music and the words at odds. It comes naturally to me. A lot of my music is like that.

I've never used ethnic music as decoration for profit.