Am I afraid of high notes? Of course I am afraid. What sane man is not?

People think I'm disciplined. It is not discipline. It is devotion. There is a great difference.

One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.

I think a life in music is a life beautifully spent, and this is what I have devoted my life to.

The rivalry is with ourself. I try to be better than is possible. I fight against myself, not against the other.

If children are not introduced to music at an early age, I believe something fundamental is actually being taken from them.

Music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.

Some singers want the audience to love them. I love the audience.

Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

As an art form, opera is a rare and remarkable creation. For me, it expresses aspects of the human drama that cannot be expressed in any other way, or certainly not as beautifully.

I know it’s hard for you to allow yourself to feel this. You've gone so long training yourself to block the feelings and emotions out any time someone touches you.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible.

Run after God. Be who you're created to be, and you'll run into the people who are doing the same thing, and those are the people that you'll want to be with.

Being a mother has absolutely forced me. You have to write things down and have systems for all of it. And then you set up systems and you realize they don't work.

When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals?

No publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide.

If you're a serious actor, it's when you know you're going to die tomorrow that you really start to feel it.