The secret of living is to find people who will pay you money to do what YOU would pay to do if you had the money.

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.

Tanglewood [summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra] was a place where gods strode the earth.

Music - opera particularly - is a process which is endurable or successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.

We must continuously discipline ourselves to I remember how it felt the first moment.

If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it.

Once in a while, when everything is just right, there is a moment of magic. People can live on moments of magic.

The fact is that great musical pieces take and hold the stage because they provide great emotional experiences.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

Success is important only to the extent that it puts one in a position to do more things one likes to do.

Opera is everything rolled into one - music, theater, the dance, color and voices and theatrical illusions.

An experiment had students rate lecturing professors with the sound off. Their ratings closely mirrored evaluations of students who went through the courses with the same professors.

All I want to do is learn to think like God. All the rest is just details.

Time well employed is Satan's deadliest foe; it leaves no opening for the lurking fiend.

Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought.

To drink is a small matter. To be thirsty is everything.

Saddam Hussein is not the only deranged dictator who is willing to deprive his people in order to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we'll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week we'll have to fight in San Francisco.

It's been a pattern in my life - when I get in trouble, I try to get out of it, since I was little.

In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.

A ruin should always be protected but never repaired - thus may we witness full the lingering legacies of the past.