With Cold Sassy Tree having its first production, I saw no necessity to do anything other than produce it with the correct setting.

At HBO, they seem to be well-informed. They make what I think are really quite mature films.

With Cold Sassy Tree having its first production, I saw no necessity to do anything other than produce it with the correct setting.

Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined.

The music of the most popular operas is so highly esteemed, it can stand endless revivals.

When I was 24 I went to Nigeria and it was such a culture shock, growing up in Australia and suddenly being the only white man in this unit full of black men.

Everyone has seen photographs of Mexicans wearing those big sombreros. When you come to Mexico, the astonishing thing is, nobody wears these hats at all.

There's a bright spot in every dark cloud.

I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.

I didn't get upset because I wasn't nominated, but I was a little surprised.

In Australia, they set up a special fund to kick films off. It was quite an enlightened sort of move. You could go to this government bureau with scripts and and get finance for films.

He's wrong. That's why his films look so terrible.

For a director, the most challenging scenes are the dialogue scenes.

The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever.

Quite a few operas are still being commissioned around the world, although nothing apart from audience popularity can ensure more than a few performances.

It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.

In my view, the operas of Carlisle Floyd will find a place in the permanent repertoire.

Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.

In silent movies, they tended to put the camera down, and everybody walked in front of it and acted, and then they all walked off. Cutting was quite infrequent.

On stage, the audience watches from a fixed viewpoint and the director cannot retake something he doesn't like. It has to work straight through.

When we were trying to get the money for Driving Miss Daisy, everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen.

It's not enough to hit the notes. There is no point in the singers just standing there and sounding wonderful if they're not connecting with the characters they are portraying.

Film is shot in fragments, and the same moments can be shot again and again until the director is satisfied.

Perhaps the most difficult thing is shooting scenes set 6,000 feet up in the mountains of Mexico.

I don't rehearse films as much as opera or theatre. When I began directing films I thought a long rehearsal was a good idea. Experience showed me that the best performance was often left in a rehearsal room.

With a film, I do my best to understand the author's intentions and try to bring the characters to life.

There were movies that always made me want to be a director. You see brilliant scenes and the way the emotions were handled. I thought, I'd really like to do that.

In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body's way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn't meant to be.

Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms.

My first figure was a SLAYER eagle. And the dragons and the tribals are all I have got.

We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

But in the first Gulf war the United Kingdom was not under any threat from Iraq, and is still less so in the second one. Then there is no justification for obstructing freedom of information, particularly as nations have a right to know what their soldiers are being used for.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.

The first thing you do when you get out to center field is put up your finger and check the wind chill factor.

Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.