Opera Quotes - Page 22

• There was always dance in opera until people forgot to keep it going.

  Mark Morris

  People

  "Mark Morris picks up baton in 'Dido' at Berkeley" by Allan Ulrich, www.sfgate.com. September 11, 2011.

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• You don't win an Olympic gold medal with a few weeks of intensive training. There's no such thing as an overnight opera sensation. Great law firms or design companies don't spring up overnight... Every great company, every great brand, and every great career has been built in exactly the same way: bit by bit, step by step, little by little.

  Seth Godin

  Motivational, Spring, Winning

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• What is the source of power of musicians who are financially browbeaten, most of whom work for minimum wage or less? Musicians who cannot even afford to buy tickets to operas or concerts in which they themselves perform?

  Itay Talgam

  Musician, Minimum Wage, Tickets

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• Museums just seem to have this borrowed cachet—if I want to seem cultural, I will design something cultural. I resist the idea that culture is only opera houses or theatres. Culture is your entire life around you: toilets, the bus, the kerb or the dump where you drag your waste. Culture has come to mean the arts, but it’s swimming pools as well.

  Thomas Heatherwick

  Art, Mean, Swimming

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• As a teenager I studied opera, believe it or not. But I just couldn't catch on to it.

  Karen Black

  Teenager, Believe

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• The Opera reminds me of my tax audit. It was in a language I didn’t understand. And it ended in tragedy.

  Jeff MacNelly

  Tragedy, Language, Taxes

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• Disgrace is a subtle, multi-layered story, as much concerned with politics as it is with the itch of male flesh. Coetzee's prose is chaste and lyrical without being self- conscious: it is a relief to encounter writing as quietly stylish as this. I was not totally convinced by Lurie's musical abilities, with regard to his proposed opera, but that is my sole complaint.

  Paul Bailey

  Writing, Self, Musical Ability

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• Robert Duvall taught me years ago. He said, "You know theatre is not real. I don't like plays." You know, he doesn't like plays. And I agree with him in certain ways, you know. They can be fun. I don't mind going to see them. I went and saw Phantom of the Opera. I thought hey, that's cool. Look at the mask and all that.

  Billy Bob Thornton

  Fun, Real, Years

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• My mother was into opera and my father was into jazz, so there was a lot of jazz in the house where I grew up.

  Chaka Khan

  Mother, Father, House

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I did radio, I did television, I did opera, I did films in which I had very, very little to say. But I had a lot of experience in front of the camera, and that's what really counts.

  Christopher Lee

  Cameras, Television, Radio

  "Listen Back To A 1990 Interview With Actor Christopher Lee". "Fresh Air" with Dave Davies, www.npr.org. June 12, 2015.

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• I don't have a rock voice. I have to force it. I am like an opera singer.

  Meat Loaf

  Rocks, Voice, Singers

  2003 In the Observer, 7 Dec.

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• There's a kind of a line between music and math, so I guess I got the music gene, thank goodness. But my mother wasn't too thrilled. She wanted me to go to university and get a degree or do something, and my father, he liked opera so he wasn't too thrilled either, because he wanted me to be an opera singer and I didn't have - as he said, I don't really have the strength to do that.

  Olivia Newton-John

  Mother, Father, Math

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I started working in front of the camera for the first time when I was 15 years old. I joined a soap opera. We filmed in Brooklyn and I would skip class to shoot my scenes. It was terrifying and I entirely self-conscious in front of the camera.

  Paul Wesley

  Class, Self, Years

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I've always enjoyed playing a little left of center characters. Otherwise I'd be on a soap opera.

  Bruce Campbell

  Character, Littles, Soap

  "Bruce Campbell and Sharon Gless Talk Burn Notice". Interview with Brian Gallagher, movieweb.com. August 6, 2009.

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• I think that both musicals and opera have a capacity to get to an inner emotional landscape.

  Julie Taymor

  Emotional, Thinking, Landscape

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.

  Charles Stross

  Book, Writing, Space

  Reddit AMA, www.reddit.com. July 02, 2012.

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• I went to film school when I was 17, and of course when you are very young you think that there is nothing else in the world except film. At some point I started getting hungry to see something else. For five years I didn't make any films, I was traveling around the world, writing for newspapers, working in theater, working in opera, I thought I would never return to film.

  Pirjo Honkasalo

  School, Writing, Thinking

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• I've been singing my whole life, since I was a kid; but never formally as a career. I did it in plays when I was younger, and I sang all styles of music: everything from Italian opera to blues.

  Brittany Murphy

  Kids, Italian, Play

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Tom [Courtenay] and Albert Finney met Ron Harwood on the dresser, so that's how it started. It's a wonderful documentary. It's called Tosca's Kiss and Mr Hardwood told me about it when I asked him what the genesis was. It was made in 1983 and Verdi, who was rich and successful, toward the end of his life decided to build a mansion for himself in Milan, where he lived, and he stipulated that when he died opera singers and musicians - because he knew so many who were no longer playing at the Scala and some were poor - could live there.

  Dustin Hoffman

  Successful, Kissing, Musician

  "Quartet - Dustin Hoffman interview". Press conference, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• You're always in a tunnel that you can't see the end of. But there's something that took place on this movie that I don't think we expected and that was that once we decided that the entire cast would be real retired opera singers and retired musicians... and these people the phone hadn't rung for them for 20 or 40 years even though they can deliver.

  Dustin Hoffman

  Real, Thinking, Tunnels

  "Quartet - Dustin Hoffman interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• Cathedrals are built with pennies of the faithful. A great opera house also is a spiritual center, a temple of sorts, where many gather together for recreation, education, and inspiration - a blessed trinity worthy of public support.

  Eleanor Robson Belmont

  Spiritual, Blessed, Inspiration

  Eleanor Robson Belmont (1957). “The Fabric of Memory”

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• Musicians ought to reclaim some of the power in the houses of production. The opera houses are run either by managers or by stage directors, never by musicians.

  Laurence Equilbey

  Running, House, Musician

  "There Will Be Joy". Interview with Lydia Perović, logger.believermag.com. August 1, 2013.

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• I wouldn't know anything about opera music if it wasn't for Bugs Bunny. That was my entire introduction to opera music. I wouldn't know anything about classical music if it wasn't for "Fantasia." They didn't have to do that stuff. They chose to base this ridiculous, funny, intriguing, creative story on this beautiful classical music. It's the combination of the high and the low that I thought was very cool. But I had no concept of it as a kid.

  Jon Hamm

  Beautiful, Kids, Creative

  "MINIONS: Allison Janney and Jon Hamm Talk Animation, Their Characters, and More". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. July 9, 2015.

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• I remember someone once saying, "Pete, you know you really should take voice lessons." And I said, "Well, if I could find any voice teacher that could teach me to sing like Lead Belly I'd spend every cent to study under him." But every time you'd go to a voice teacher, he'd teach you to warble, as if you'd want to be an opera singer, and that's not what I'm interested in.

  Pete Seeger

  Teacher, Voice, Lessons

  Source: www.folkmusicworldwide.com

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• Opera is everything rolled into one - music, theater, the dance, color and voices and theatrical illusions.

  Sarah Caldwell

  Color, Voice, Illusion

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