Top 135 Violin Quotes

I had studied violin from age 7 to 14.

The nice thing about the violin repertoire is that it’s small enough that you can plan on learning everything at some point – whereas the piano repertoire is so enormous it wouldn’t be possible unless you’re a learning machine.

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 was in the chorus in high school, not a soloist. I was on the basketball team. I was in modern dance, part of the group. I was a cheerleader, part of the group. I played the violin, part of the orchestra. I never wanted to be out there alone. Ever.

K.G. Sathar, a neighbour, was my guru. He taught me the violin and Hindustani music.

The violin didn’t keep me from doing things I wanted to do.

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.

I actually wanted to play the violin before I had polio, and then afterwards, there was no reason not to.

If you look at somebody like Bach, he didn’t need collaborators to write for keyboards, cello, violin or anything else. I feel the same way about my music. The times that I have worked with other people, I’ve been very unhappy with the results.

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.

When I was five I had violin lessons.

I first picked up a violin aged five – I just assumed everyone played.

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

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.

I’m not going to play my violin, but with my dwarfism, I’m a bit of a mutant.

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.

I started off with violin, then I started learning guitar, then I went to piano. But I self-taught piano just because I enjoyed it. I’ve always really enjoyed music.

As far as I’m concerned, I want to do everything because life is short. So, when I did ‘The Red Violin’ film, I got to go to the Oscars, and I got to meet Samuel Jackson, and I got to do stuff that one wouldn’t normally do in my world.

A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?

I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the resonance of the violin.

If I started something, I had to finish. Like with violin. I started when I was seven only because my best mate wanted to. I hated it and wanted to quit, but Dad made me continue, and I got to grade seven. My parents said I had to know the value of stuff and work for stuff.

The violin is my mistress, but the guitar is my master.

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

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.

My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.

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.

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.

Unlike a high-wire walker, I don’t think any musician strikes the wires of a piano or draws a bow across a violin’s strings primarily for the kick of an adrenalin fix. There is danger on stage, but dropped notes are not broken bones; a memory lapse is not a tumble to the ground.

The violin has always been important for me. My mom was a single mom and we moved around a lot, and so the violin was always the one constant I had. I always feel better when I had my violin. Playing it is cathartic.

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.

With the violin, for example, one understands culturally that the sound comes from the instrument that can be seen. With electronic music, it is not the same at all. That’s why it seemed so important to me, from the beginning of my career, to invent a grammar, a visual vocabulary adapted to electronic music.

Well, my main instrument is violin, but I think of myself as a songwriter who happens to play violin.

When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you’re telling a story.

I started with the classical violin when I was 6, and I guess it went well.

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

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.

My mother played the piano and my father the violin, I can remember my dad teaching me how to waltz; I had my feet on his, my mother playing the piano, and my husband will tell you the lessons weren’t very successful.

Some songs are just going to be acoustic with just maybe some light background stuff going on and maybe violin or something like that. Or sax – I mean, I’m definitely having some sax. That’s just what I love. It’s going to be jazz-rock stuff. That’s what I’m aiming for.

The Third Quartet I made the instruments in pairs – Two different pairs – Violin and viola, and violin and cello. They played very different things from each other all through the whole piece.

I learnt violin at school and hated it. I wish I’d learnt guitar or piano.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Whoever heard of an electric violin, electric cello or, for that matter, an electric singer?

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

We developed our own type of Igudesman and Joo electric violin, let’s say, and funny enough, the shape of it was developed by the head technician of Steinway. It’s actually an electric violin, which is made from the stick that holds up the piano lid.

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 studied classical violin and voice until I was 18 and by then I had had my fill.

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.

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

I am playing the violin, that’s all I know, nothing else, no education, no nothing. You just practice every day.

I realised, however, that you can’t sing when you’re playing the violin – or at least I can’t – and as that aspect of performing is important to me I shifted to the piano.

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 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 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.

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.

My brother, who’s a violinist now, was the real ham, the real performer of the family. His passion for the violin is the only thing that kept him from being an actor.

I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn’t really know how to successfully get me going.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music – not to mention his piano and violin concerti.