Violin Playing Quotes

When I was eight, an uncle, great uncle, gave a violin to me, and my father took me off to have lessons. After about six weeks, the violin teacher told my father he was wasting his money, wasting his time, and wasting my time, and it's one of my big regrets.

I played the violin my whole life. I wanted to play from the time I was just a little kid, and I've always loved dance as well. I wanted to make people smile. I wanted to add an extra energy to my playing and make it visual and make it unique and fun.

Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

I wasn't making it with the violin because I was playing all of the 'long hair' stuff.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

I never felt like a prodigy. For one thing, the root of the word is rather monstrous, literally. I never really felt like a monster or anything abnormal, because I always had a lot of different interests. But kids tend to focus on one thing, and for me it was violin.

An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?

To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.

I don't mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.

If you asked someone, 'Can you play the violin?' and he says, 'I don't know, I have not tried, perhaps I can,' you laugh at him. Whereas about writing, people always say: 'I don't know, I have not tried,' as though one had only to try and one would become a writer.

I'm too busy playing to worry about the movement or the fingerboard.

My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia.

I had no idea I was gonna be a songwriter, because I was too young to know my own evolution. I started playing the violin as a way to express myself because I didn't have a lot of vocabulary when I was 14.

Well my dad forced me into playing the violin when I was about three and it all started from there. I went to Suzuki for violin lessons, and you learn to play by ear instead of reading music.

When Jack Benny plays the violin, it sounds as though the strings are still in the cat.

I played violin and got into that Suzuki program in the second grade.

Second violins can play a concerto perfectly if they're in their own home and nobody's there.

I have this weird musical thing I do: I play violin, and I even went on tour with Tim Robbins. We did a bunch of Canadian cities, and then went down to the States, and then we ended up in Japan.

I have a very simple philosophy. One has to separate the abilities from the disabilities. The fact I cannot walk, that I need crutches or a scooter or whatever it is, has nothing to do with my playing the violin.

My grandma has a picture of Louis Farrakhan playing violin in her house.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

If you want to make films, you'll watch Kurosawa. If you want to play a violin, you listen to Seghetti. Same with somebody who has the ambition to play in the NBA. I watch a basketball game; I enjoy it. Somebody who really wants to learn to play is studying whatever is most magnificent that's going on out there.

If I'm playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger.

There is no worse sound in the world than someone who cannot play the violin but insists on doing so anyway.