The moral of the story is not to listen to those who tell you not to play the violin but stick to the tambourine.

When I started learning the violin, my choir teacher thought I could sing. But when I first got on stage, I froze!

As a child, I studied violin. My sister, who's 10 years older, was the actress in the family. I was painfully shy.

I sometimes use a girl singer the way Henny Youngman uses his violin - as a bridge between one laugh and the next.

I'm just a one-instrument player. I have been known to play a blender, but I basically play - just play the violin.

I usually listen to the same thing over and over again: Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. And Leonard Cohen.

I started skiing around the same time as I began playing the piano, at around four, before moving to the violin at five.

If the Almighty himself played the violin, the credits would still read 'Rubinstein, God, and Piatigorsky', in that order.

A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.

I quit piano and violin because it felt too rigid. It was just my thing, something I fell in love with from a very early age.

I play guitar a bit. I'm trying to learn drums - I feel like I can play violin. I've never tried, but I just feel like I can.

I first started playing the violin at 6. And then at 7, it was piano. So from then it was just classical music like every day.

Although I wasn't fond of the violin in the beginning, as I played on I developed a fondness which soon turned into a passion.

I know Ornette was playing violin sometimes - that was his bridge into the classical world, to break up that whole pecking order.

Electric guitars are an abomination, whoever heard of an electric violin? An electric cello? Or for that matter an electric singer?

Learning to play golf is like learning to play the violin. It's not only difficult to do, it's very painful to everyone around you.

I played the clarinet, and my sister played the violin... If wed had the discipline and the passion, maybe we could have been good.

I don't want to start getting my little violin out, but travelling across the world constantly and staying in hotels is tough, man.

I went to this tattoo parlor in the East Village and I got an outline of a violin on my lower back. They call them tramp stamps now.

I played the clarinet, and my sister played the violin... If we'd had the discipline and the passion, maybe we could have been good.

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

It was sort of an experiment to try to leave the violin. Can I be a real person without this thing? It was a big part of my identity.

You can imagine me as a kid growing up in redneck Texas with ballet shoes, tucking the violin under my arm. I had to fight my way up.

Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less.

I love classical music and have been playing violin since I was seven. Music helps me to express feelings in a way words often cannot.

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

I was playing violin for a long time, about 6 years. It takes a while. You need very patient people in your house when you have a violin.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

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 love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

I've decided to make my main priority for the next two years not playing the violin, but training for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

I'm not changing to the point where suddenly I wear floor-length skirts and start playing the violin; I'm just growing up a little bit, I guess.

Draw your chair up, and hand me my violin, for the only problem which we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.

We had a normal childhood. I played baseball, and we played violin in orchestras three times a week. I learned more from that than anything else.

Let me be very honest and just say that if any airline would let me take the violin and the laptop on board I would fly that airline all the time.

We get so many kids telling us that they've taken up the violin or cello. It's really special, and it wasn't really our intention in the beginning.

I began my show business career playing violin in San Francisco at the corner of Market and Taylor. I understand that there is a theater there now.

I wanted to play my violin and have my musical expression through the instrument. But then I was really young when I had my first opportunity to conduct.

We can't do a modern Batman continually beating up thugs in zoot suits with tommy guns in violin cases. The game has to move on. It has to feel relevant.

If you put your hand on the piano, you play a note. It's in tune. But if you put it on the violin, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. You have to figure it out.

There's a million people who can go out and play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto brilliantly, but we're the only ones who can do 'A Little Nightmare Music.'

One cannot inherit a talent for the violin - there are no violins in nature. Instead, one must be motivated, able to benefit from practice, and persevering.

When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn't realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.

I am very lucky and grateful to have this living link to a past era, the violin presumably having much more history to it than the later portion that I know.

It was really amazing. I mean, he'd never mentioned that he played in the symphony, like serious violin playing, not fiddle playing. And he just blew us away.

[When asked if the voice is an instrument:] Yes, of course. Some are violins, some are fountain pens and some are stethoscopes. And others are just washboards.

I actually play piano and violin, but I don't have a passion for it. It didn't make me wake up in the morning wanting to do it, or go to bed thinking about it.

Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.

I'm incredibly competitive in all sports in a way that is so mystifying to my wife because she grew up playing the violin and piano. I've always been like that.

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