I have an intuition, and usually my intuition is right. I have a feeling for whether a role will be good or bad for me, and I almost never make a mistake.

Im just a normal person. Its not like I come home and think about opera. My thoughts are about completely other things. Shoes! Dresses! Expensive ones: with a pretty silhouette, beautiful fabrics.

Maybe because Im a nice and sweet person in life, I like the darker roles. The really dark one is Lady Macbeth.

Russians always need a little sh*t in our lives. If everything is good and we seem completely happy, then we become suspicious of that.

Lots of opera singers are just boring.

I'm just a normal person. It's not like I come home and think about opera. My thoughts are about completely other things. Shoes! Dresses! Expensive ones: with a pretty silhouette, beautiful fabrics.

The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?

I've always been a student of this life, not a teacher. More of a sponge than a fountain.

What is wrong with Christians today is that we have the gifts of God but have forgotten the God of the gifts.

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

I don't think I can ever escape from music.

If you think you are free, there is no escape possible.

A state is not a state if it belongs to one man.

When you're at an Olympic Games watching someone you've known for a long while and he or she has done something, even if it's only coming in the top 50, then you have a monumental night.

One of my biggest superstitions is to never speak about the future out loud. Lets just say I got a lot out there and I hope to keep on going.