I received a beautiful welcome to the world of music. I want to give something back to the younger generation.

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.

If you also thinks it means I wake up every morning wondering what I did to deserve having you back in my life, well, you'd be right about that too.

I have been feeling very much lately that cheerful insecurity is what our Lord asks of us.

Both of my parents got to see me host Carson, thank God. That's all anyone wants: to have their parents see they're going to be all right in life.

By the time the Oscars are on I'll be seventy. How many more chances am I going to have to get nominated for an Oscar?

Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing.

If we start without confidence, we have already lost half the battle and we bury our talents.

Defeats and failures are great developers of character. They have made the giants of our race by giving Titanic muscles, brawny sinews, and far-reaching intellects.

Medicare will usher in federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have know it in this country.

That's the Irish all over -- they treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.

I can’t be sure, of course, but I’d compare it to living on tofu and soy milk; we call ourselves vegetarians, our little inside joke. - Edward Cullen