I very much faced my mother's death with hard, arduous and time-consuming labor. The more I would do, the less I would feel.

The moment something happens to one you love, it's twenty times more intense. You experience pain and enlightenment on a much vaster scale.

Premiering a new opera is probably one of the hardest things in the world to do, and opening nights of any opera are always pretty stressful.

What I love about my daughter is that she is going to definitely allow me and force me to change my life and slow down and make it more about the real things in the world.

All these poses of classical torture ruined my mind like a snake in the orchard. I did go from wanting to be someone, now I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue.

Yes, I'm a homosexual and I like to shock people with glamour.

Climate change has always been sort of my main focus. I think also with [what happened in Fukushima, Japan] there's still a lot to think about in terms of what's coming down the pike into the world's oceans, too.