“I like digging around. I’m a real magpie. I used to raid the old music shops in the early ’50s in Paris and Brussels. You could pick up some incredible and often valuable music for almost nothing back then.”
“I’m very fortunate. I’ve led a charmed life, I think.”
“I am one of the luckiest people ever born.”
“I am busy all day long. Never bored – I don’t know what the word means.”
“I go to bed at midnight and get up at 9. I never take a nap. I don’t get tired.”
“Lots of young singers come to me and ask, ‘May I sing to you?’ I say, ‘Yes, you can sing to me as long as you don’t mind what I tell you, because I’m not going to flatter you. I’m going to tell you what I think.’ Oh, yes, they’re quite happy about that, until they hear it.”
“You go to a musical; you are deafened by them, with everything blown up. I remember musicals when they didn’t use microphones.”
“Don’t talk to me about Freud. I’ll go up the wall!”
“When I started, I’d never had a conducting lesson in my life; I could just do it.”
“The most important thing for any performer is to know your own weaknesses. It’s much more important to know what you can’t do than what you can do.”
“It takes a big voice a long time to develop properly; the bigger it is, the harder it is to develop the technique.”
“If I can’t do an opera as well as most people, I won’t do it at all. I don’t want to touch Wagner because I think a lot of people do it a hell of a lot better than I could. I do the operas I think I can do, know something about.”
“The idea is not to have one great singer surrounded by a bunch of nit wits. When the others are good, too, that’s when you get something happening in opera.”
“I think the air in New York is death.”
“I’ve had a wonderful life – I really didn’t expect to have this career.”
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