Concentration is everything. On the day I'm performing I don't hear anything anyone says to me.

People think I'm disciplined. It is not discipline. It is devotion. There is a great difference.

One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.

I think a life in music is a life beautifully spent, and this is what I have devoted my life to.

The rivalry is with ourself. I try to be better than is possible. I fight against myself, not against the other.

If children are not introduced to music at an early age, I believe something fundamental is actually being taken from them.

Music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.

Some singers want the audience to love them. I love the audience.

Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.

You don't need any brains to listen to music.

As an art form, opera is a rare and remarkable creation. For me, it expresses aspects of the human drama that cannot be expressed in any other way, or certainly not as beautifully.

Everybody has good and bad forces working with them, against them, and within them.

The imagination of creative thought can be a crazy place, this giving reason to write it down to try and make sense of it all.

I am not the potter, nor the potter's wheel, but the potter's clay, does it depend on the value achieved intrinsic as much as the value of the clay as the wheel and master craftsmanship?

I love food shows: Anthony Bourdain, Iron Chef, Chopped, you name it.

It keeps me in touch with younger musicians who are constantly saying, 'Have you heard this new artist, or this new guitar player?' It keeps you reaching.

I love a good non sequitur.

I have to say when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisons.

It was a fortunate moment in history that I happened to be in. There was a confluence of the internet and all this other stuff that I was able to capitalize on.

Hush," he said. "I am asking you to marry me. Would you be convinced if I knelt down?

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience.