Nerves just mean that you care.
I regard the people as a great being, inspired by a single idea. This is my problem. I strove to solve it in this opera.
Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.
My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling must, without exaggeration or violence, become true, accurate music.
In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.
And another thing about German symphonic development. I tell you, our cold kvass soup is a horror to the Germans, and yet we eat it with pleasure. And their cold cherry soup is a horror to us, and yet it sends a German into ecstacy. In short, symphonic development is just like German philosophy and soup-all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with some reasoning.
Thanks to nanny, I've got a deep understanding of Russian tales.
Trust. That was what this was all about. If you can't trust the one you love, you don't have anything.
The difficulty in working with someone on a show like Idol or X Factor is they have an idea of what they think is cool in their heads, and it's important as a producer to maintain control of the session and not let it get side-tracked or chase too many rabbits. But it's also important to let the artist feel like their opinion matters, so that balance is difficult.
Ever since I was a child I've felt connected to water: lakes, rivers, streams--I love to jump in and swim around. But it's the ocean where I go for rejuvenation, revelation, and solace.
I had seen so many injustices done in the court by well-meaning people. I had lost fourteen clients to gang violence in only seven years. I was angry at a system I thought had failed my clients, and I was part of it.