Whenever you hold a fellow creature in distress, remember that he is a man.
ART is domination. It's making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours.
I belong to the givers. I want to give a little happiness even if I haven’t had much for myself. Music has enriched my life and, hopefully - through me, a little - the public’s. If anyone left an opera house feeling more happy and at peace, I achieved my purpose.
Don't talk to me about rules, dear. Wherever I stay I make the goddam rules.
I don't need the money, dear. I work for art.
An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.
What [Tulio Serafin] said that impressed me was: "When one wants to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act on stage, all you have to do is listen to the music. The composer has already seen to that. " If you take the trouble to really listen with your soul and with your ears - and I say soul and ears because the mind must work, but not too much also - you will find every gesture there. And it is all true, you know.
You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.
As a boy, I believed freedom for America meant freedom for me. There was a time I believed every word spoken.
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
It would be very curious to record by means of photographs, not the stage of the picture, but its metamorphoses. Perhaps one would perceive the path taken by the mind in order to put its dreams into a concrete form. But what is really very curious is to observe that fundamentally the picture does not change, that despite appearances the initial vision remains almost intact.