Quotes About Performance

I sang opera for over four years when I was younger.

When we work on a new theatre piece, we improvise a lot. But it's the opposite in opera, where everything is fixed.

I'd always had this hankering to try some opera.

I'm an opera lover.

I adore opera and I truly believe it is one of the most beautiful art forms on Earth.

If you are going to take me a to a musical, you'd better give me three songs that I'm gonna like. Nobody goes to the opera for the recitative. They go for the aria.

You can't get down and dirty at the opera.

I like Strauss's operas because it's all women's voices; I like opera that's hysterical.

The jewellery I wear on stage in the opera house is not real, but the bling-bling I wear in concerts? Those are real!

Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.

I know I'm an opera singer, but we're actors, too.

I was an acting opera singer, and that's one of the reasons I left opera.

I never wanted to be an opera singer. I wanted to be an actress, maybe a rock singer.

For me, a diva is like the great opera singer, the great film star - out of reach, in their own world, with a real gift for invention: attention-demanding performance artists with a flamboyant, compelling sense of their own importance so special and inimitable it verges on the alien.

I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!

I grew up on the side of the stage. I never had a fear of an audience. I never felt like they were separated from us. We were all in the living room, and it happens to be a big living room. I continue to operate on that assumption.

Dealing with Jazz at Lincoln Center and its board of directors, who are so great, and then seeing how these Rock Hall guys operate, it's like: 'Really?' It seems like they're total amateurs when it comes to doing shows and contracts.

I have a huge interest in sports, and I study the way athletes operate throughout their careers.

I was only operating at about 80% of my capacity.

Coming from a football background, when everybody is doing their job and operating on such a high level, it only motivates you to do the same.

Being together on the field as a group, operating as a team, making important plays is a great thing.

You can miss a kick on a good hold and you can still make kicks with bad holds but the more the operation is perfect, the percentages go up and up.

I'm grasping with how you do something on a large scale with multiple operations and not have quality decrease.

I want to see you use your brain. Get the job done efficiently. I want to see an intelligent operator at work. And apart from that, to stay on my good side, just do as you're told.