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.

Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar no matter what the project is.

I've had to be a man since I was 12 or 13. I had a job. And I was playing the piano for people twice my age. Handling responsibility is what makes a man a man.