Top 100 Quotes About Operas
#1. People don't want to pay 8 or 9 dollars to go see a problem that they have in their life, on screen. They pay to get away from that. That's why they watch soap operas.
Omar Epps
#2. I think that baseball games are like soap operas. If you watch five in a row, you know enough to get hooked.
Jennifer Garner
#3. 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
#4. I watch soap operas. I bake brownies. Normalcy is coursing through my veins.
Parker Posey
#5. Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It's a general clean-out.
Julian Fellowes
#6. '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
#7. Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.
John Eaton
#9. When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I'd constantly be that guy who'd get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.
Chris Lilley
#10. Brains cause technology, society, art, science, soap operas, sin. A remarkable set of effects for such a small chunk of coagulated atoms.
Colin McGinn
#11. 'Rigoletto' has long been one of my favorite operas, and it was on my short list way back when I first talked to Peter Gelb. I started thinking about what I could bring to this masterpiece, which has been seen all over the world for so many years.
Michael Mayer
#12. I've finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.
Gloria Steinem
#13. I came to Berlin not to visit its museums and galleries, its operas, its theaters ... but for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world's greatest living man - Alexander von Humboldt.
Bayard Taylor
#14. You have to think about the WWE as soap operas.
Linda McMahon
#15. The music of the most popular operas is so highly esteemed, it can stand endless revivals.
Bruce Beresford
#16. Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!
Erica Jong
#17. If I knew how to operate a DVR, you'd find episodes of 'The Tavis Smiley Show,' 'Democracy Now!' and lots of stuff from TV Land. What you can find now on my Hulu account are Korean soap operas, 'Grey's Anatomy' and films from the Criterion collection.
T'Keyah Crystal Keymah
#18. Don't think you can watch all the romantic movies, soap operas, TV shows and read all the romantic books out there and not be affected. Ninety-nine percent of the romantic stuff out there is garbage ... and what you put in always comes out ... UGLIER!
Osayi Emokpae Lasisi
#19. The soap opera was so long ago - the thing about soap operas, and there's something to be said for doing it, but you do a script a day. I don't want to say it's a training ground; it really isn't, but what it does teach you is discipline.
Frank Grillo
#20. Reality TV has totally destroyed soap operas. They're gone. They used to be the biggest thing in the world - they're gone.
Gilbert Gottfried
#21. We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#22. I have nothing but admiration for the actors on soap operas. It is unbelievably challenging to put out an hour show in one day.
Catherine Mary Stewart
#23. In my iPod, there are many operas, from A to Z. I have 'Aida' and 'Boheme' and 'Butterfly' and 'Cavalleria'. My passion is for opera, but when I'm in the car, I listen to everything.
Andrea Bocelli
#24. Counterfeit Kings is the King Lear of space operas. Science fiction has a fresh, new, no-nonsense voice and his name is Adam Connell.
Steven-Elliot Altman
#25. I seem to write an opera about every 20 years; if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970.
Virgil Thomson
#26. Daytime soap operas, which I used to adore, have been declining in quality and importance for over a decade, and I gradually stopped monitoring them.
Camille Paglia
#27. I spend my days watching soap operas, eating bonbons and plotting society's downfall.
Tana French
#28. My real passion is for opera. It was born and developed by listening to records, and my dream as a child was to record entire operas when I grew up, and this dream came true.
Andrea Bocelli
#29. I started in this business on soap operas.
Lauren Holly
#30. Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
#31. My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.
Harrison Birtwistle
#32. Operas elucidate, in a way sometimes absent in other theatrical productions, the very human fact that in every hero, there is a thread of duplicity. In every villain, there is another side to consider: We don't have to like him or her, but we are compelled to think about motivation.
Karen DeCrow
#33. I was a regular on 'Holby City,' and I did daytime; that's how I started off. Off in Hong Kong doing stuntman stuff, then coming back to England doing daytime soap operas.
Scott Adkins
#34. I've done a lot of operas. I've probably done more different kind of operas than anybody.
Tod Machover
#35. Twentieth-century culture's disease is the inability to feel their reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theater, pop idols and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead.
Jim Morrison
#37. Women in Hollywood are tiny, but women in soap operas are the tiniest people alive!
Julie Bowen
#38. I was 11 and watching soap operas with my mom, and I thought it would be cool to be an actor. I thought soap operas was going to be the dream at the time - it's obviously now not the dream, but I think soap operas are really cool. Maybe I'll go back to that.
Britt Robertson
#39. I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long.
Margot Asquith
#40. I'm involved with a baroque opera company here in Italy. I write some of their booklet material, comments on operas. I also write for some baroque opera festivals because this music is my real passion.
Donna Leon
#41. It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?
David Byrne
#42. If I felt that one of my operas did not come off I would certainly say so.
Carlisle Floyd
#43. Truths that startled the generation in which they were first announced become in the next age the commonplaces of conversation; as the famous airs of operas which thrilled the first audiences come to be played on hand-organs in the streets.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#44. Regular church-goers are substantially more likely than non-attenders to read, to take newspapers and magazines, to listen to classical music, to attend symphony concerts, operas, and stage plays.
Rodney Stark
#45. I maintain that Western popular culture at its best is worthy of respect and should be cherished as much as the operas of Wagner.
Ibn Warraq
#46. My mother took me to a lot of operas and when I was eight I got the opportunity to be in one and I realized that transformation into these make-believe situations was possible. I decided that was essentially what I wanted to do with my life.
Ezra Miller
#47. I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Perry Mason,' 'L.A. Law.' Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program - a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.
Peter Ackroyd
#48. In the modern operas that 'Miss Saigon' and 'Les Miz' are, nobody breaks out into song from conventional book dialogue. Everything is sung from beginning to end, including the recitative.
Lea Salonga
#49. I think if you study people in the street today, you do sometimes feel that they have taken their behavior and their language from things that they have seen rather than read - from soap operas and movies and so on.
Ronald Frame
#50. Since I was eight years old. I didn't have a TV, so comic books were definitely my television, my soap operas, and all that.
Method Man
#51. My soap operas have been seen by a billion people all around the world.
Thalia
#52. For reality's glow and glory, without poetry,
Fade, like the red operas of sunset
Delmore Schwartz
#53. Professionally, I did a couple of operas when I was in school, when I was 18.
Lucy Griffiths
#54. I think I'm aware of entering my late 30s versus being in my late 20s, when the web was coming out as this new thing. It reminds me of how people used to tell me about my great-grandmother and how they used to gather around a radio listening to soap operas.
Kalup Linzy
#56. The operas I loved were nineteenth-century novels!
John Irving
#57. One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark's Saturday night 'American Bandstand' show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia.
Robert C. Merton
#58. A resolution to attend theatres or operas is an absolute disqualification for Holy Orders.
Samuel Wilberforce
#59. I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera.
Mark Twain
#60. I used to listen to the soap operas with my grandmother.
Bob Edwards
#61. I'm very musically inclined. My parents were opera singers. As a young child, I could hear operas and I knew if they were sad, or if they reminded me of something, or they brought back a memory.
Sandra Bullock
#62. The earth was once molten rock and now sings operas.
Brian Swimme
#63. When I've seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can't tell you what that phenomenon is.
Carlisle Floyd
#64. Gioacchino Rossini, the composer of William Tell and many other operas, had a good grasp of the relationship between music and food: "What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions." If
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#65. I would advise all young musicians to not only experience and play chamber music, but to go to operas, speak to the singers, to explore and expand your horizons.
Wu Han
#66. Quite a few operas are still being commissioned around the world, although nothing apart from audience popularity can ensure more than a few performances.
Bruce Beresford
#67. I live again the days and evenings of my long career. I dream at night of operas and concerts in which I have had my share of success. Now like the old Irish minstrel, I have hung up my harp because my songs are all sung.
John McCormack
#68. It's important that we have the traditional operas and the repertory, but we should also have something new.
Robert Wilson
#69. An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
Edith Wharton
#70. A man can't love you because you haven't read as many books as he has? He can't love you because you don't speak French or because you don't go to operas? You're telling me we have to fall in love with people who are just like us?
Billie Letts
#71. Soap operas are such a great way to break-in to the industry. The diminishing landscape of daytime TV means it's going to be harder for young talent to get discovered.
Josh Duhamel
#72. Out here the sunsets were like Italian operas, torrid, emotional affairs that went on for three hours or more, hanging in the sky like burning castles.
Paul Murray
#73. I never learned music. I'm quite uneducated, and usually I sat in front of the TV, with soap operas on, in England. It was very inspiring for me, I'd done all this traveling around, I came back living with my parents, everyone around me was like they're living in a soap opera.
Graham Parker
#74. Giovanni always had music running through his head. Moments he experienced in life recalled for him scenes from operas. [Giovanni Tempesta]
Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco
#75. I conclude that the Wagnerian operas which are already in the repertoire, and other masterworks as well, stand in no further need of my services.
Franz Liszt
#76. We used to listen to all the marvelous operas on records. Music was a very important part of our lives.
Charlotte Rae
#77. Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of 'Star Trek' or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men.
Nathan Myhrvold
#78. The success of our operas rests most of the time in the hands of the conductor. This person is as necessary as a tenor or a prima donna.
Giuseppe Verdi
#79. So many actors started on soap operas. So yeah, I'd graduated Julliard and done some theater. I've done a few guest spots on TV but nothing that long-term. I did a little 'E.R.' back when it was on, and a pilot for 'Cold Case.'
Finn Wittrock
#80. I'd better be on the road, or I'll be going nuts. I'm not the kind of guy who sits around with a pipe and slippers watching soap operas.
Tommy Shaw
#81. Verdi was a genius. Sometimes in his operas, the strings in the orchestra, particularly the cellos, play in such a way that it is as if you are hearing the very heartbeat of Verdi.
Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco
#82. To be able to make a good living in a challenging medium like soap operas is great. The best is that I get to act and am rewarded for it. And the people I work with are great. Funny, intelligent, hard working. They're all great to be around.
David Canary
#83. Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton began in 1980s soap operas and 1970s sitcoms, respectively, such ancient history by show business standards that you need carbon dating to measure their careers.
Steve Erickson
#84. I saw a lot of operas from backstage and watched a lot of rehearsals - my parents were singers.
Rosamund Pike
#85. It heartens me to think of Verdi who composed thundering operas in his eighties; Michelangelo who did fine work in his ninetieth year, and Titian, who painted better than ever in his one hundredth.
James A. Michener
#86. Growing up, for years and years I had no idea what the plots of operas were, and that's part of what fascinated me - I could make them up and learn bits and pieces of what was going on over time. There's something about it being always a step away that makes it more fun to chase.
Rufus Wainwright
#87. We are riveted by the soap operas of public lives. We admire the famous most for what makes them infamous: it reassures us that they are not better and no happier than all the people with their noses pressed hard against the glass.
Maureen Dowd
#88. My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in nature.
Henry David Thoreau
#89. My parents watch too many soap operas, that's their trouble. In fact, they were probably hoping I was pregnant. By my wicked married lover whom they could then murder and bury under the patio.
Sophie Kinsella
#90. In my view, the operas of Carlisle Floyd will find a place in the permanent repertoire.
Bruce Beresford
#91. For awhile I taped soap operas and watched them at night when I thought I might be forgetting what it was like to be human. After a while I stopped, because from the examples I saw on those shows, forgetting humanity was a good thing.
Charlaine Harris
#92. I worry that our lives are like soap operas. We can go for months and not tune in to them, then six months later we look in and the same stuff is still going on.
Jane Wagner
#93. You listen to Handel operas, right? And there are a thousand of them, right? And they all sound alike. If I look back on my work, maybe it's the same thing.
Isaac Mizrahi
#95. My grandmother was this unbelievably smart, phenomenally cool woman and [soap operas] were just always on in her house. I just realized that I live in a soap opera, and it's awesome.
Ian Somerhalder
#96. I loved him, but love isn't enough. All the fairy tales, the romance novels, the soap operas; they're all lies. Love does not conquer all.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#97. Our mistake, you see, was to write interminable large operas, which had to fill an entire evening. And now along comes someone with a one or two-act opera without all that pompous nonsense - that was a happy reform.
Giuseppe Verdi
#98. 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
#99. I do other sorts of things. I act in other people's movies. I direct operas. I write books.
Werner Herzog
#100. In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries.
Michael Dirda
