I want to sing more in Spanish. I want to sing the songs of Granados; the songs of Montsalvatge. To do things that truly I've not done before.

I was given a stethoscope in a child's 'doctor's bag' at about age six and I loved it! One could hear the heart beating through that plastic toy.

Pigeon-holes are only comfortable for pigeons.

Problems arise in that one has to find a balance between what people need from you and what you need for yourself.

I am grateful that my horizons were not narrowed at the outset.

My arias make me take off as if I were on a trampoline.

It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.

There's no anger ever in a spiritual. There's always the dream of a hope of a better day coming. That God understands the troubles that I'm experiencing.

There has never been a time when I was not committed to, involved in, or caring of, the social and political issues of my world.

One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.

I walk an 11-minute mile without huffing and puffing.

Children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people.

Arrival at a new destination only occurs from leaving your current location.

What the poor need is not charity but capital, not caseworkers but coworkers. And what the rich need is a wise, honorable and just way of divesting themselves of their overabundance.

Elegance is refusal.

That's where you have to look for your inspiration. Don't separate the rest of your life - who you are, what you love - from your work.

Conceptual writing is looking for that "Aha!" moment, when something so simple, right under our noses, is revealed as being awe- inspiring, profound, and transcendent.

No great saint lived without errors.

I don't jog. It makes the ice jump right out of my glass.

What the apartheid system was really good at doing was convincing groups to hate one another.

No religion is better than an unnatural one.