That's been my sort of aim in life, to never miss an opportunity.

I knew that I could be more creative onstage, to state my own case and deliver my own interpretation of the role much more aggressively than in the recording studio.

Opera is for a lifetime, not just a minute.

When I perform Strauss, it is as if the music fits me like a glove. My voice seems to lie in a happy area in this music, which is lyrical and passionate at the same time.

I'm completely in charge of my own life now. Sometimes there's no one there to slap me on the hand and say: 'Stop being so bullish and bossy,' and things like that.

I felt that the studio recording process makes you stand still too long.

My energy is undiminished. Someone said to me the other day, 'Are you retired?' and I said, 'Well, I'm just trying to prove that I'm not.' There's so many things to do.

The word 'no' is a very good word in a singer's repertoire.

I never had the influence of any other singer in my music, so I sounded like myself all the time.

I'm more confident now than I've ever been. As you get older, you have to be.

I grew up in the New Zealand countryside. We didn't have television until I was 14, so sing-alongs were our only entertainment.

Change Management can become more successful with people at the core of change, the cause of change and the purpose of change.

I like to take inspiration from people who do things that I could never do.

That way you can be certain to learn something you didn't know previously.

So cry if you need to but I can't stay to watch you It's the wrong thing to do

An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it.

My Bubbie lived to 104, which is probably a little too old to consider a ripe old age, because she had already started to turn. I still say she died young.

What was once justified as sanctioned by God is now properly reviled as an unconscionable violation of human rights.

It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.

We cannot wait any longer to deal with the structural causes of poverty, in order to heal our society from an illness that can only lead to new crises.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.