Mandolin Quotes

I got my first instrument at Christmas when I was three or four. My dad and mom got me a mandolin. It was the only instrument that fit me because I was so small. I went straight from that into drums when I was six and then started playing guitar when I was seven or eight. (Chord Overstreet)

Peter was sick of being a pop star, the guitar god, and so he decided to teach himself other instruments. Among the instruments that he picked up was the mandolin.

Michael Stipe

I'm a farmer with a mandolin and a high tenor voice.

Bill Monroe

The National Enquirer published this thing called the "Chow like Cho Diet," which was this fake diet that I never went on, with all these fake quotes from me, like "When I was a little girl, I was raised on rice and fish. So when I get heavy, I go back to that natural Asian way of eating." That is so Mulan. You can almost hear the mandolin in the background. "When I was a little girl, I grow up on the rice paddy... and although we have no food, I have a tendency to put on weight."

Margaret Cho

The sound of the mandolin is a very curious sound because it's cheerful and melancholy at the same time, and I think it comes from that shadow string, the double strings.

Rita Dove

To a heart transformed by love, it is a mandolin.

Anton Chekhov

It's an advantage having a limited output. When George Gershwin is asked to play his repertoire, he plays all evening. I just play "Lady Play Your Mandolin" and I'm through.

Oscar Levant

My grandfather played a mandolin, so I got my hands on that. Then on down to a banjo, and I found I couldn't play any kind of soft or mournful music with that so I took up the fiddle in my late 20s or early 30s - and that was far too late. But it keeps me off the streets. It has been a love of mine since I was 17 maybe.

Brendan Gleeson

At the age of nine, playing the violin at school, and then onto the mandolin.

Noel Redding

My dad also plays a little banjo and guitar, my mom plays the mandolin.

Page McConnell

When Jack White called and wanted me to do a video and play mandolin with The Raconteurs, I didn't know anything about The Raconteurs at that time. (Ricky Skaggs)

At a young age I thought, 'Wow, that fiddle thing, that's pretty cool. That mandolin is great. These drums, I like these drums... ' They were Indian drums. And I was saying, 'But that guitar. That guitar. Girls are going to like that guitar.'

Robbie Robertson

I managed to win Battle Of The Bands with one mandolin player! It was me and eleven goth bands and I won.

KT Tunstall

That song has the full extent of my mandolin abilities; I'm not a good mandolin player at all.

John Fogerty

I really want to write a novel. I also want to learn to play the mandolin.

Emma Watson

I am increasingly irresponsible, it seems, in that I take on the mantle of Peter Pan and follow the second star to the right directly between a pair of speakers, or to the case that holds my mandolin.

Mark Heard

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy, the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

Mary Schmich

I believe that I became a poet, a writer, when I was transcribing my grandma's songs in Mexico. I was about 15 years old. And my grandma used to sing with the mandolin a beautiful song that she used to play, and I thought at that point that she was basically singing from the old tradition of Mexico. But then I became aware that those were her own songs, but she had never written down the songs herself. So I decided to then transcribe the songs, and I would listen to her, and then write down the songs. They were very beautiful songs, in the Hispanic tradition of Guatecos and the ballads and so forth.

Francisco X. Alarcón