Raving mad is quite easy. You just chew up the scenery or something. It's quiet mad that's hard.

Music - opera particularly - is a process which is endurable or successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.

Tanglewood [summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra] was a place where gods strode the earth.

The fact is that great musical pieces take and hold the stage because they provide great emotional experiences.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it.