I performed in Sydney some years ago for the Sydney Festival and I am just so pleased to be returning to the wonderful Sydney Opera House and also performing in Melbourne for the first time.

I would just like to say that opera is no longer about fat people in breastplates shattering wine glasses.

The musical heritage of Yorkshire is deep and wide.

I'm engaging my diaphragm as I'm speaking to you right now.

And woven into the fabric of this harsh existence was music.

There are a lot of unseen elements to having a successful singing career.

I performed in Sydney some years ago for the Sydney Festival and I am just so pleased to be returning to the wonderful Sydney Opera House and also performing in Melbourne for the first time.

As far as I was concerned the important thing was that the music was getting the attention as well as me so it was always a great way to get more of the public to connect with classical music, and opera particularly.

I don't just come from a musical family, but from a musical community.

I wouldn't want to criticise someone like Charlotte Church because she has done fantastically well, but personally I've always cared about the long term.

That was when I realised that music is the most profound, magical form of communication there is.

One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.

I do a lot of vocal hygiene.

Opera is credible drama now, and it costs less than going to a football match. What have you got to lose?

I saw The Sound of Music when I was 10 and thought that it was the most beautiful singing I had ever heard.

To tell you the truth, I never listen to opera at home.

I'm very pro presenting the best music I can to the widest audience possible.

I don't think I have ever met a single person who isn't moved by music of some kind.

Nobody inspired me more than Julie Andrews, who is a classically trained soprano herself.

What people really should be able to be confident in is that the standards of music- making that classically trained musicians present is elite, it is the best and all of us as artists should be committed to that.

It worries me that young singers think you can shortcut the training and go straight to fame and fortune, and programmes like Pop Idol have encouraged that.

I do hope that our spring will be starting shortly and we will all be able to enjoy some sunshine again.

Singing is an arduous business and it needs sacrifices.

Music is there to access those dark emotional corners that we don't normally get too close to.

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.

Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort.

I want to be the first lady to land a quadruple jump in competition. As I grow older, I know that my skating style will develop and mature.

I bought my first camera in Seattle, Washington. Only paid about seven dollars and fifty cents for it.

Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.

Obviously I faced the possibility of not returning when first I considered going. Once faced and settled there really wasn't any good reason to refer to it.