Some people are drawn naturally - there are natural guitarists and there are natural piano players and I think guitar implies travel a sort of footloose gypsy existence. You grab your bag and you go to the next town.

Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The history of the music industry is inevitably also the story of the development of technology. From the player piano to the vinyl disc from reel-to-reel tape to the cassette from the CD to the digital download these formats and devices changed not only the way music was consumed but the very way artists created it.

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

I love films that make me react emotionally and physically when you walk out of the cinema. Two of my favorite films however have got to be 'The Tree Of Life' and 'The Piano Teacher ' which also stars one of my favourite actresses Isabelle Huppert.

Both my grandmothers had upright pianos and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once and I could play it.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989 my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons.

If you lock me in the room with a piano teacher for a year I might be able to knock out a rendition of 'Roll Out The Barrel ' but will I ever be a concert pianist? No.

I'm blessed with a good pair of ears. That's how I fooled my piano teacher. I'd watch his fingers and I'd listen to it and I just kind of basically learned it by myself.

I have never been so calculating as to sing some Barry White song to get a girl. But I do think it's very romantic to cook dinner and sit around the piano at night and sing together.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

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.

I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression whether it was through music or acting or dancing or painting or writing.

I don't know any other lifestyle. I get up in the morning and I really do feel that the world is my oyster and I start that way the same as I would if I were preparing to write a song: put a blank piece of paper up on the piano and you go for it.

I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is now?

My mom's a concert pianist so she started teaching me when I was around seven. When I was eight I started writing my own songs and kinda started putting piano and singing together. But I'm trained classically which is a big influence on me I think.

It's quite hard to have your mom as a teacher - it's like she's not necessarily a 'real teacher' for me. But she'd always teach me to really hear the music and develop my ear and to try and hear the harmonics of the piano.

I took piano for many years. I kicked and screamed through all of my lessons but my mom really insisted.

But my mom was a pianist and she taught piano out of her house. I was just so excited being a little kid and having all these other kids come to my house twice a week. I thought it was a big party.

I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.

Part of the joy of music is listening to lots of different kinds of music and learning from it. Specifically for me I like writing songs that move me and what moves me are beautiful songs on the piano or the guitar and really really heavy music.