I have enjoyed most particularly reading the correspondence between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The genuine friendship, competitiveness and support that thread through their communications are life lessons for us all.

My arias make me take off as if I were on a trampoline.

I want to keep learning, keep exploring, keep doing more.

One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.

If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live.

I like so many different kinds of music that I've never allowed myself the limitations of one particular range.

I am grateful that my horizons were not narrowed at the outset.