Top 100 Opera Opera Quotes
#1. That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes.
Mordechai Vanunu
#2. Politics, poverty, riches, etc - these are but backdrops for the grand cinema, the opera: the glory of your life. Sure, change the backdrops, make them better, but it is this inside-ness that matters most. Nothing else, at the last breath, matters, but your very own poetry. The glory of living.
Alex Ebert
#3. An opera singer is like an athlete before a match. An athlete cannot overdo anything. In order to perform at the highest possible level, you need to refrain from activities so as to be able to express this power.
Andrea Bocelli
#4. People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it.
Noel Coward
#5. Celestials is a soapy space opera. Perhaps a spacey soap opera.
M.C. O'Neill
#6. Life is too short for cuisine minceur and for diets. Dietetic meals are like an opera without the orchestra.
Paul Bocuse
#7. I never liked opera growing up. I always liked chamber music or solo music even more than orchestral music.
Tod Machover
#8. For the love of God, unless you're prepping for Rigoletto at the Met, go easy on the eyeliner.
Cheryl Cory
#9. It's the perfect environment for prayer. Chanting in Greek ... is like a beautiful opera, but way better.
Troy Polamalu
#10. When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.
Bruce Beresford
#11. Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#12. When one would ask most modern artists, poets, writers and other status quo fueled semi-intellectuals who Machiavelli was - was that an opera singer?
Martijn Benders
#13. I'm not named after the character,' she said. 'I'm named after the entire opera.
Julie Orringer
#14. When the story is good enough, people can watch something three times the length of an opera.
Kevin Spacey
#15. The important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap opera; not the income tax, but the expense account; not the Bomb, but the nuclear stalemate
Isaac Asimov
#16. I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked.
Jacqueline Carey
#17. If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it.
Margaret Fuller
#18. There is nothing I fear more than someone without memory. A person without memory is free to do anything she likes.
Kameron Hurley
#19. I love classical music and often listen to symphonies or opera in the morning.
William Mapother
#20. We'll go along with it for now. Valkyrie, keep close watch and be ready to swoop to the rescue."
'Hopefully swooping will not be required, nor rescue. But I am ready to do both.'
He squeezed her hand. "Alex?"
"I'm ready, too.
G.S. Jennsen
#21. Can't wear it to the opera," said the Colonel, almost smiling. "Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go.
John Green
#22. Dumb luck brought on the move from business to acting. I had moved to New York when I was 23, in the year 2000. On a lark, I went to audition for a soap opera. I thought, 'Hey, this will be a really fun story to tell my grandkids one day, that I auditioned for a soap!'
Teddy Sears
#23. No, no, you have driven me mad! When I think
that I had only one object in life: to give my name to an opera wench!
Gaston Leroux
#24. They're getting me involved in intrigue again, and I think it follows a classic formula in a soap opera.
Michael Zaslow
#25. What I've discovered and really confirmed to myself is that opera really likes loud colours, and you need something bold, something savage, unpredictable, passionate. You can't really run a two-hour opera round some muted murmuring.
Ian McEwan
#26. When I do operas, I'm not really singing very classically. I have a classical background as far as being a pianist and an oboist, but my voice isn't really classical in the operatic sense. But I certainly have a classical sensibility, so I'm comfortable being in that world.
Jason Graae
#27. I'm moved by a lot of different kinds of music, whether it's pop music or R&B or straight-ahead jazz or free or opera or music from all parts of the world.
David Sanborn
#28. 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.
Sarah Caldwell
#29. They talk as an English butler might after several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#30. I watch soap operas. I bake brownies. Normalcy is coursing through my veins.
Parker Posey
#31. A cabaret song has got to be written - for the middle voice, ideally - because you've got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act, more even than an opera singer.
James Fenton
#32. Who is the hunchback in my comic opera, but me? I'm crippled on the inside and unable to make the gestures of love ...
John Geddes
#33. A mask you ask? Optional I find!
Masks lend appeal of a mysterious kind.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#34. Strange that I should choose you for the confidante of all this, young lady; passing strange that you should listen to me quietly, as if it were the most usual thing in the world for a man like me to tell stories of his opera - mistress to a quaint, inexperienced girl like you!
Charlotte Bronte
#35. I have also just finished three weeks on a soap opera in England. The soap opera is a rather famous one called Crossroads. It was first on television 25 years ago, and it has recently been brought back. I play the part of a businessman called David Wheeler.
Jeremy Bulloch
#36. In the case of 'The Housewives,' I call the 'Housewives' sociology of the rich. I think it's just fun to watch. It's guilt-free gossiping that you can have. It's like the modern-day soap opera, in my mind.
Andy Cohen
#37. After 'Spelling Bee,' I started landing more jobs ... I got 'Candide' at New York City Opera.
Lauren Worsham
#38. My father, my uncles, my aunts, from my father's side and my mother's side ... they were all professional musicians. My father was a concert master, he took me to a lot of rehearsals, concerts, performances, opera, ballet. For me, that was life.
Lalo Schifrin
#39. He offered his love ... she could not bother,
She gives her love to the other! The other!
E.A. Bucchianeri
#40. It's very much like opera singers. They do the same thing. The first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, the thing they think about is their voice and how to take care of it.
Johnny Mathis
#41. Ask most kids about details about Auschwitz or about how the American Indians were assassinated as a people and they don't know anything about it. They don't want to know anything. Most people just want their beer or their soap opera or their lullaby.
Marlon Brando
#42. Whether you're an opera singer, a legislator or customer service operator, there is a way that we can find common ground with our audience - be they young or old, Democrats or Republicans, rich or poor, religious or secular.
Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick
#43. Sometimes we need to step away from our current reality in order to truly appreciate it.
L.E. Horn
#44. The fact that I could secure an opera engagement made me realize I had within me the making of an artist, if I would really labor for such an end. When I became thoroughly convinced of this, I was transformed from an amateur into a professional in a single day.
Enrico Caruso
#45. Every problem has a gift for you in its hands as my man Richard Bach says. You can choose to see the curse or the gift. And this one choice will determine if your life is a success story or one big soap opera.
Jon Gordon
#46. Strigoi or not, I didn't trust him. He was a jerk, and I silently screamed at Lissa to get out of there, not that my screaming did much good. Stupid one-way bond.
Richelle Mead
#47. I love to play. I love, opera, hiking and museums. The one thing I don't do is sit. I have a tremendous amount of energy.
Alan Dershowitz
#48. You could probably prove, by judicious use of logarithms and congruent triangles, that real life is a lot more like soap opera than most people will admit.
Molly Ivins
#49. It's not easy to look the way I do: in popular culture, one only sees a face like mine on the Phaontom of the Opera, on Freddie Krueger from Elm Street, or on Leatherface from deep in the heart of Texas. Sure, a burn victim may "get the girl" - but usually only with a pickax.
Andrew Davidson
#50. I had classical training but I don't consider myself an opera singer though.
Emmy Rossum
#51. You'll find in Africans a fantastic amount of heavy space opera and so on, going on ... which makes the colored African very, very interesting to process because he doesn't know why he goes through all these dances ... and why he feels so barbarous ...
L. Ron Hubbard
#52. You went to your first Broadway play or musical at some point, right? Come to opera.
Sondra Radvanovsky
#53. I've never been to the opera; I've only seen opera on DVD.
Gemma Arterton
#54. When the subsidies are going out there to fund arts, I'd like to see jazz given a better shake of the dice. It attracts as many people as opera does, but not the subsidies.
Sebastian Coe
#55. 'Macbeth' is one of the best operas ever, and doing it was a great experience. I added some things to the opera based from my experience on the movie - such as some of the special effects and bits of film - to make it new and interesting. It was a very good work and a very good experience.
Dario Argento
#56. I have no particular plan in life - and that's something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I'd be left alone to read
Elizabeth Knox
#57. I felt frustrated by the limitations of rock and the lifestyle of touring around on a bus and playing the same songs over and over. So I went back to school to study music, and one of the things I got into was the Italian opera composer Puccini.
Rivers Cuomo
#58. If there was anything the last year had taught her - if there was anything Caleb had taught her, the Metigen War had taught her - it was that perspective was everything.
If you wanted to understand your enemy, you must understand that they were the hero in their own story.
G.S. Jennsen
#59. My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It's their fault I've become an actress.
Bar Paly
#60. An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.
Maria Callas
#61. The only thing worse than opera is someone who hums along with opera.
Josh Lanyon
#62. My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.
Alexander Chee
#63. Is as if the music is another character or as if it was a part of this great opera. I also through about this project as a structure or as a sculpture made out of colors, rhythm, characters, and brush strokes, but with every single one of these always supporting one another.
Alex Abreu
#64. Deep in the recesses of her mind, she knew they were probably watching. They watched everything, after all.
Let them watch. Let them see what it meant to be human. To live.
Let them see what it meant to love, and be loved in return.
G.S. Jennsen
#65. Opera singers, we're not muscle men; you have to be careful about your work.
Ildar Abdrazakov
#66. Mostly what I listen to when I turn on my little iPod is opera.
Joan Baez
#67. Americans, they have an incredible operatic tradition: the Metropolitan Opera House is - if not the most prestigious - one of the most prestigious opera houses in the world for over 100 years.
Jose Carreras
#68. At the moment I'm enjoying a new challenge at the Royal Opera House, but I'm also keen to pursue my interest in television and particularly in science.
Deborah Bull
#69. I quit my job in the bank when I was 19. I took a chance. I went to Milan to study opera and singing. My father really supported me economically.
Marcello Giordani
#70. How long you been in the infantry, sir? Anything under ten miles counts as 'almost there'.
Henry V. O'Neil
#72. Norway ... looked to Roosevelt as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe ... It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king.
Edmund Morris
#73. If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.
Douglas Coupland
#74. I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.
Bruce Beresford
#75. I want to make these films that I think other people would be scared to do. I don't think anyone can go off and make a rock opera. I think it's a very specific niche.
Darren Lynn Bousman
#76. I came a fabulous opera. I saw that all beings have a fatality for happiness: action is not life, but a way of spending your strength, an irritation. Morality is a weakness of the brain.
Arthur Rimbaud
#77. Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it.
John Eaton
#78. Meg and I dreamed ... a foolish dream that we might flee to Italy, buy a small villa in the country. I would be an eccentric recluse, and she wouldnpreform on the stage. We might yet have made a life...
Sadie Montgomery
#79. My family was very supportive of whatever I wanted because my grandfather was an opera singer. My dad's dad. So my dad has an appreciation for the arts, and he let me choose my own path.
Tony Hale
#81. I sang opera, I sang show tunes. I got into a rock band for a while. I've sung a lot of different things.
Tom Wopat
#82. I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
Umberto Eco
#83. The activity of a singer that sings opera is similar to that of an athlete.
Andrea Bocelli
#84. I wish the opera was every night. It is, of all entertainments, the sweetest and most delightful. Some of the songs seemed to melt my very soul.
Fanny Burney
#85. The only thing altruism will get you here is a boot stomping on your head.
Henry Mosquera
#86. It's much easier for me to be silly than it is to be serious on soap opera.
Doug Davidson
#87. The audience is requested not to refrain from talking during the overture. Otherwise they will know all the tunes before the opera begins.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
#89. I have no desire to become a crossover artiste, singing with microphones. I believe in opera; that it is something that young people would love if they had a chance to hear it.
Anna Netrebko
#90. A few days later we went to the opera together to watch my beloved Siegfried. It was a pleasure for me to listen to it beside the man who had become my hero.
Andre Maurois
#91. Cincinnatians support a symphony, an opera, a ballet, museums, many galleries and theater groups.
Bill Dedman
#92. My dad became a soap opera actor, and I was an extra in a skating rink scene on the soap. I didn't audition. It was nepotism all the way.
Jennifer Aniston
#93. Remember what they did to Broadleaf, and remember what they did to us. Now it's time for us to kill 'em back.
Henry V. O'Neil
#94. At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy.
Henry Miller
#95. In opera tradition, when opera die-hard fans, there is a replacement of singer or singer wasn't at his or hers vocal best, doing something, they boo. Especially now that they pay hundreds of dollars for the ticket.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#96. It felt somehow comforting to return to the sparkling lake tucked into the mountains on Portal Prime. But why, when everything about Mesme made her the antithesis of comfortable?
Because here was where desperation had become hope. Where helplessness had become purpose.
G.S. Jennsen
#97. To be let go from a soap opera is the most embarrassing confidence basher in the world. It's like, 'Oh, if I'm not good enough for that, I'm not good enough for anything.'
Cam Gigandet
#98. I wanted to be Whitney Houston at first, and when I started taking voice lessons, my voice teacher kind of geared me more towards opera.
Megan Hilty
#99. Think 'Game of Thrones.' In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn't really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it's structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera.
Douglas Rushkoff
#100. My family were symphonic musicians and in the opera. Also, it was my era, the love of radio. We used to listen to the radio at night, close our eyes and see movies far more beautiful than you can photograph.
Francis Ford Coppola
