You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.
I really do believe I can accomplish a great deal with a big grin. I know some people find that disconcerting, but that doesn't matter.
I'm not happy, I'm cheerful. There's a difference. A happy woman has no cares at all. A cheerful woman has cares but has learned how to deal with them.
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.
At the beginning, I thought, 'Oh, I can't criticize a singer who's doing a role that I adored... even a role I didn't do.' And then I thought, 'The heck with that! Thirty years of experience... ask the girl who did it!' And I feel that if they're not willing to take what I have to say, that's fine! But I'm going to say it.
When I was general director of City Opera, we were pioneers in the practice of projecting supertitles so that American audiences finally could know what all the singing was about.
I never breathe through the nose, not when I'm singing. In the opera, you don't have so much time. That's fine at the beginning of an opera or after somebody else has been doing an aria, and you want to get a good fresh start.
I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar.
Art is the signature of civilizations.
You can't imitate; all our faces are constructed differently... and the vocal cords; otherwise, we'd all sound alike. I don't think anybody should ever teach by imitating.
I frequently say that I never share blame, I never share credit, and I never share desserts!
I love Massenet - 'Manon' had been a wonderful role for me - and the music he wrote for 'Thais' is quite enjoyable and not terribly demanding in a vocal sense.
There is a growing strength in women but it's in the forehead, not the forearm.
The 'Daughter of the Regiment' that I did in Boston was vintage Sarah Caldwell, which is to say it was brilliant. Before my career was over, I'm sure I sang the role of Marie at least a hundred times, often in productions that cost a fortune, but none touched hers.
I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!
My parents never told me about Papa's lung cancer or the desperate nature of the operations he was about to undergo, which were a last-ditch effort to contain the spread of his cancer.
In a sense, I revolutionized the operatic scene because I proved you can make a great international career without the Metropolitan. I'm the only singer who's done that, and I'm proud of that, so it's all worked out for the best.
My voice had a long, nonstop career. It deserves to be put to bed with quiet and dignity, not yanked out every once in a while to see if it can still do what it used to do. It can't.
My father died five days before I returned to New York. He was only fifty-three years old. My parents and my father's doctor had all decided it was wiser for me to go to South America than to stay home and see Papa waste away. For a long time, I felt an enormous sense of guilt about having left my father's side when he was so sick.
