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

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.

The grace of life is the seed of endless gladness.

There's nothing happy about love at all!! I would rather have not known real love... if it hurts this much.

You have to have courage to be obedient to God.

I know the pundits, they get big bucks for . . . pundating.

There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.

Long-term success is never achieved on our own. The phrase 'a self-made man' is a myth all along the way we need support.

We speak piously of ... making small studies that will add another brick to the temple of science. Most such bricks just lie around the brickyard.

When I'm left on my own I'm my own worst enemy.

A cheery relaxation is man's natural state, just as nature itself is relaxed. A waterfall is concerned only with being itself, not with doing something it considers waterfall-like.

You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.