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.

I got started when I was 3 years old because my father was a music teacher and my lessons were free. Instead of learning to walk you learn to play the piano.

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.

Football management is such a pressurised thing - horseracing is a release. I'm also learning to play the piano - I'm quite determined - it's another release from the pressure of my job.

Man after all my grandma put into me learning the piano that was a hard day telling her I was telling jokes for a living.

I hope to refine music study it try to find some area that I can unlock. I don't quite know how to explain it but it's there. These can't be the only notes in the world there's got to be other notes some place in some dimension between the cracks on the piano keys.

The only instrument I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home I play the piano and make them on the piano.

It's funny: I'm a lifelong musician but because I principally play the piano it's been a solitary thing.

I totally related to Cole Porter's magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room which he was famous for doing as was Gershwin. You couldn't drag them away from a piano.

With 'Bright Star' and with 'The Piano ' too I felt a kind of sadness about it being in such a different era because of my lack of experience with the era. And one of the ways I'd get over it is to remind myself that every film even if it's contemporary creates its own world.

Actually music gave me the support when I needed it. I would never have gone to college unless I'd gotten a piano scholarship. And now I'm so glad I got to learn to play the cello which is a different experience you're flexing a different muscle but it's beautiful because it is music.

I think we were raised in a nice Texas Jewish family where education was the most important thing and close behind that was the arts. It was emphasized and expected that we'd play piano.

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.

My dad didn't want me to play guitar. He played piano so I chose that. And I ended up loving it.

Although my dad was a doctor we weren't necessarily a super-artsy family. We were just a classic traditional family who got to take a lot of piano lessons and became a bunch of musicians.

Within our culture every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or playing the piano then your dad viewed you as a sissy basically.

My dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years. And when he opened his campaign headquarters back in the early '70s when I was 5 years old my mother wanted me to play the national anthem. And they got an upright piano on the back of a flatbed truck and I played it.

A female piano player is always pretty cool to me.

Now guitar was pretty cool. Everybody knew something on the guitar. So I wanted to play guitar but I told my dad if he wanted me to keep studying something I'd like to study piano.

The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible. So I'll play in bands and record and play songs with other people but for me it's a form of expression that all I need is me. I don't need cameras or agents I can just have a piano and sing and feel totally verified.

I gave up lots of things I love doing: writing and business and playing the piano and so on.