Ask before offering advice or reassurance.
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.
Opera is for a lifetime, not just a minute.
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 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.
That's been my sort of aim in life, to never miss an opportunity.
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.
Better to work and fail than to sleep one's life away.
I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You've got to just stand there and take it.
Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.
You put music in categories because you need to define a sound, but when you don't play it on your so-called radio stations that claim to be R&B or jazz or whatever. . . All music is dance music. But when people think of dance music, they think of techno or just house. Anything you can dance to is dance music. I don't care if it's classical, funk, salsa, reggae, calypso; it's all dance music.